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The Philippines had been colonized by the United States of America for several decades. This had left an enduring mark in the Tagalog language. The main reason for this was the massive re-education program undertaken by the Americans when they established the public educational system in the Philippines. The massive re-education of the Filipinos had resulted in a large number of English words being assimilated into the Tagalog language. The resulting practice of intermingling English and Tagalog in everyday conversation had been dubbed Taglish.

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A large influx of English words has been assimilated into Tagalog and the other native languages called Taglish, which is an example of code-switching.

 

As with other examples of code-switching, Taglish is spoken for convenience. Tagalog words are often longer than their English counterparts, so English words are used instead. For example:

"Can you explain it to me?"

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can be said in the classical Tagalog way as:

"Maaaring ipaunawa mo sa akin?" or
"Maaaring ipaliwanag mo sa akin?"

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Instead speakers nowadays say

"Maaaring i-explain mo sa akin?" or "Maaaring paki-explain mo sa akin?"



However, it is often difficult for foreigners to understand Taglish. For instance, English signs in the Philippines often have the wrong spellings and the way English words are used is sometimes uniquely Filipino, with confusing and occasionally unintentionally amusing results.

 

In the First Philippine Summit on Early Childhood Education in 2009, scholars stated that it is important not to mix the two languages and they discouraged the use of Taglish. Filipino parents are suggested to make clear which language they would like to use to communicate with their children, so they can acquire different languages easily.



From our research, among all the respondents, only two of them talked about ‘Taglish’ in their answers. However, it does not mean that other respondents do not use ‘Taglish’ in their daily conversation. Indeed, it is believed that many of them use ‘Taglish’ to communicate with their friends since they stated they use both English and Tagalog in the conversation particularly in friendship and religion domain. Both the linguistic environments in Hong Kong and the Philippines have given rise to ‘Taglish’. For most of the Filipino domestic helpers, since they are able to speak fluent English and Tagalog, they will code-switch while talking to each other. It is very much similar to the case in Hong Kong, where a large number of the people code-switch with Cantonese and English.



It is also interesting to notice that the two respondents who pointed out the term ‘Taglish’ are quite young. It is believed that Taglish is a new term for the Filipinos, especially for those who work overseas, to identify themselves. They are able to code-switch between Tagalog and English.