Philippine Spanish
Philippine Spanish is the variety of standard Spanish spoken in the Philippines, used primarily by Spanish Filipinos.
Spanish as spoken in the Philippines contains a number of features that distinguish it from other varieties of Spanish, combining features from both Peninsular and Latin American varieties of the language. Philippine Spanish also employs vocabulary unique to the dialect, reflecting influence from the native languages of the Philippines as well as broader sociolinguistic trends in Spanish, and is considered to be more linguistically conservative and uniform than Spanish spoken elsewhere.
Officially regulated by the Philippine Academy of the Spanish Language, up to a million people in the Philippines are claimed to be either proficient in or have knowledge of Spanish, with around 4,000 people claiming Spanish as their native language, although estimates vary widely.
Distribution and number of speakers
Philippine Spanish speakers may be found nationwide, mostly in urban areas but with the largest concentration of speakers in Metro Manila. Smaller communities are found particularly in regions where the economy is dominated by large agricultural plantations, such as the sugarcane-producing regions of Negros, particularly around Bacolod and Dumaguete, and in the fruit-producing regions of Mindanao, particularly around Cagayan de Oro and Davao City. Other centers where Spanish-speaking populations can be found include the cities of Cebu, Iloilo and Zamboanga. Most native Philippine Spanish speakers are part of the country's middle and upper classes.Estimates as to the number of Spanish speakers in the Philippines vary widely, with estimates ranging from the thousands to the millions. In 2014, the Instituto Cervantes estimated that there were around one million Spanish speakers in the Philippines, regardless of level of proficiency, while in 2023 Maria Luisa Young, professor of Spanish and head of the Department of Modern Languages at the Ateneo de Manila University, estimated without confidence that around 500,000 people in the Philippines either speak or at least know Spanish. A 2023 report by the IC, meanwhile, estimated that there are around 465,000 Spanish speakers in the Philippines, though only counting Spanish citizens in the Philippines as having a native-level command of the language, including speakers of the various dialects of Chavacano, a Spanish-based creole, as limited-competence speakers, and excluding Filipinos who studied Spanish in universities before 1986. When counting native speakers, the Philippine Statistics Authority reported in the 2020 Philippine census that only 167 households nationwide spoke Spanish at home, and a 2020 estimate estimated that this group numbered around 4,000 people, but the actual number of native Philippine Spanish speakers living today may be impossible to determine.
Accurately counting Spanish speakers in the Philippines is complicated by the Philippine government not keeping updated official statistics, with the last supposedly reliable statistics on the number of speakers dating back to 2008. That estimate placed the number of native Spanish speakers at around 6,000, with an additional two million Filipinos who speak Spanish either as a second or third language and another 1.2 million Chavacano speakers, and that number possibly being larger due to increasing interest in learning Spanish among Filipinos for professional reasons.
In addition to reported estimates of speakers, it is believed that there is an undetermined but significant number of Spanish semi-speakers, Filipinos who may otherwise have never formally learned Spanish but whose knowledge of the language, whilst below that of native speakers, is considered to be superior to that of foreign students learning the language for the first time.
Status and future
Compared to other Spanish varieties, Philippine Spanish is among the least studied, and many contemporary studies that claim to talk about the dialect were, in fact, either dealing with Spanish loanwords in the native languages of the Philippines or, more erroneously, to the various Chavacano dialects to which it was often mistakenly confused for.Philippine Spanish has been described as being endangered, or even totally dead, with most speakers also being fluent in English and the Philippine languages, and the language having few native speakers under the age of 50, with many of its speakers also having learned other Spanish dialects and are living outside the Philippines either in Spain or in other Spanish-speaking countries. In part due to the American colonization of the Philippines, where English was imposed as the language of government and education, and the implementation of a Tagalog-based national language, use of Spanish declined, particularly after World War II when English was entrenched as the language of social prestige. Spanish-speaking Filipinos mostly use the language at home, with use of the language in public being limited by a lack of speakers and hostility from non-Spanish-speaking Filipinos toward the language, although many Filipinos who previously studied Spanish while it was still mandatory are capable of sustaining a conversation that reasonably approximates the language.
This, however, contrasts with recent trends concerning Spanish in the Philippines more broadly, on the one hand due to changing attitudes toward the language among non-Spanish-speaking Filipinos, and on the other due to the growing prestige of the language worldwide. Interest in the language started growing in the 1990s, only a few years after the language lost its official status, and starting in 2009 Spanish was reintroduced as part of the basic education curriculum in a number of public high schools, becoming the largest foreign language program offered by the public school system, with over 7,000 students studying the language in the 2021–2022 school year alone. The local business process outsourcing industry has also contributed to the growing popularity of Spanish as Spanish speakers have a larger earnings potential than English speakers in the industry. A new generation of Spanish speakers has since emerged as a result, most of whom are second-language speakers, and with some using the language to show national pride, though there exists within this group a smaller number of first-language Spanish speakers who are learning the language at home from their second-language parents.
Phonology
Philippine Spanish phonology has been described as conservative and refined, reflecting the socioeconomic status of its speakers, and exhibiting features largely present in the standard dialects of Peninsular Spanish as spoken in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with little influence from dialects such as Andalusian or Canarian nor from languages like Catalan or Galician despite significant immigration to the Philippines from those areas of Spain. Nevertheless, a number of phonological traits still distinguish Philippine Spanish from Spanish spoken elsewhere as a result of earlier contact with Latin American Spanish varieties, contact with the Philippine languages and the development of Chavacano, though unlike with Philippine English, Philippine Spanish phonology is generally uniform, with very little dialectical variation in terms of pronunciation between speakers of Spanish from different regions of the country.Distinction between ''y'' and ''ll''
As in some dialects in northern Spain and some bilingual zones of Latin America, Philippine Spanish has a phonological distinction between the sounds represented by ll and y. For example, is pronounced as opposed to the pronunciation found in most other present-day Spanish varieties. The phoneme may be realized closer to in the pronunciation of some younger Philippine Spanish speakers. Sometimes is depalatalized to in word-initial positions: for example, , normally pronounced, is pronounced.While yeísmo, which merges the two, is today considered extremely rare and idiosyncratic in Philippine Spanish, it has been suggested that a more yeísta pronunciation was previously standard owing to the influence of both Andalusian and Mexican Spanish speakers in the 16th and 17th centuries. This is suggested by words such as , pronounced in many Philippine languages and with the spelling reflecting this pronunciation, although others have instead borrowed the lleísta form. Speakers only shifted to a contrasting pronunciation, which was characteristic of the aristocratic Castilian pronunciation of the time, toward the end of the 19th century in the final years of Spanish colonization, although it has been suggested that a residual yeísmo continues to persist in the speech of modern-day Philippine Spanish speakers.
Newer generations of Spanish speakers have begun adopting phonological features closer to standard Peninsular Spanish, including yeísmo, as a result of being educated in that dialect, although the majority of those studying Spanish in the Philippines as a foreign language nonetheless continue to contrast both sounds.
Seseo
Like Latin American Spanish, Philippine Spanish practices seseo, where is normally not distinguished from. This is particularly evidenced by borrowings into the Philippine languages where, for example, , pronounced in Peninsular Spanish, became Tagalog . Although seseo remains the dominant pronunciation today, in a similar way to the introduction of a contrast between y and ll at the end of the 19th century, some native speakers have begun practicing distinción, where is distinguished from, but do not always do so consistently.Newer generations of Spanish speakers have begun adopting distinción as a result of being educated in Peninsular Spanish, alongside a contemporary adoption of yeísmo. Among those studying Spanish in the Philippines as a foreign language, most practice distinción although a large group of students nonetheless practice seseo, and among those who do practice distinción, most do so inconsistently.