绿帽换妻

All Filipino languages are descended from a language which was once universal in an area of the East Indies bounded on the north by Taiwan, on the south by Java, and which reached as far west as Madagascar; it also included much of the Southeast Asian peninsula. This is the approximate extent of Kroeber's "East Indian" culture area. Today the languages are classified under the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian family of languages, which extends as far east as the Hawaiian Islands; Filipino languages are subclassified as Western Malayo-Polynesian. Tagalog, or Pilipino, is the dialect of the second most numerous cultural group, the lowlanders who inhabited the Manila area when the Spanish arrived.

That geographical positioning seems to be the major factor in determining language tends to cause problems for the "migration wave" theories of Beyer and others. As shown by the distribution of the various Visayan dialects, people who face each other across the sea frequently use the same dialect even though they live on different islands, and vice-versa; this hints at the importance of trade in the formation of language areas.

There is a considerable portion of the Filipino vocabulary which derives from the Sanskrit and Tamil languages of India. It is interesting to note that Tagalog contains about twice as many Sanskrit words as the Visayan or Mindanayan languages, which suggests that a more prominent position may have been held by Manila in the trade networks. It is also interesting that much of the Sanskrit vocabulary are words that denote religious and intellectual concepts.

The southern islands also inherited a good deal of Arabic from the Moslem conquerers.

Writing

The Spanish found the Tagalogs, Visayans, and other groups using a form of Sanskrit writing to incise records and prayers on bamboo poles; this is still in use by the Mangyan peoples of Mindoro and the Tagbanwa of Palawan. The original form of this writing was probably that used by the Tagbanwa: top to bottom and left to right.