Tagalog people
The Tagalog people are an Austronesian ethnic group native to the Philippines, particularly the Metro Manila and Calabarzon regions and Marinduque province of southern Luzon, and constitute the majority in the provinces of Bulacan, Bataan, Nueva Ecija, Aurora, and Zambales in Central Luzon and the island of Mindoro.
Etymology
The most popular etymology for the endonym "Tagalog" is the term tagá-ilog, which means "people from the river". However, the Filipino historian Trinidad Pardo de Tavera in Etimología de los Nombres de Razas de Filipinas concludes that this origin is linguistically unlikely, because the i- in ilog should have been retained if it were the case.De Tavera and other authors instead propose an origin from tagá-álog, which means "people from the lowlands", from the archaic meaning of the noun álog, meaning "low lands which fill with water when it rains". This would make the most sense considering that the name was used to distinguish the people of the lowlands of the Manila region, which was formerly primarily swamps and marshlands, from the people living in higher elevations.
Other authors, like the American anthropologist H. Otley Beyer, propose that tagá-álog meant "people of the ford/river crossing", from the modern meaning of the verb alog, which means "to wade". But this has been rejected by de Tavera as unlikely.
Historical usage
Before the colonial period, the term "Tagalog" was originally used to differentiate lowland dwellers from mountain dwellers between Nagcarlan and Lamon Bay, the taga-bukit or taga-bundok ; as well as the dwellers of the banks of Laguna de Bay, the taga-doongan. Despite the naming distinctions, all of these groups speak the same language. Further exceptions include the present-day Batangas Tagalogs, who referred to themselves as people of Kumintang– a distinction formally maintained throughout the colonial period.Allegiance to a bayan differentiated between its natives called tawo and foreigners, who either also spoke Tagalog or other languages – the latter called samot or samok.
Beginning in the Spanish colonial period, documented foreign spellings of the term ranged from Tagalos to Tagalor.
History
Prehistory and origin theories
The Tagalog people are said to have descended from seafaring Austronesians who migrated southwards to the Philippines from the island of Taiwan.Specific origin narratives of the Tagalog people contend among several theories:
- Eastern Visayas – Research on the Philippine languages hypothesize a Greater Central Philippine subfamily that includes, among others, the Bisayan languages and Tagalog, the latter vaguely assumed to have originated somewhere in the Eastern Visayas.
- Borneo via Panay – The controversial Maragtas manuscript dates events from around the early 13th century, telling a great migration of ten datus and their followers somewhere from Borneo northwards and subsequent settlements in Panay, escaping the tyranny of their Bornean overlord, Rajah Makatunaw. Sometime later, three datus sailed back from Panay to Borneo, then intended to make return for Panay before blowing off course further north to the Taal river area in present-day Batangas. Datu Puti continued to Panay, while Kalengsusu and Dumaksol decided to settle there with their barangay followings, thus the story says is the origin of the Tagalogs.
- Sumatra or Java – A twin migration of Tagalog and Kapampangan peoples from either somewhere in Sumatra or Java in present-day Indonesia. Dates unknown, but this theory holds the least credibility regardless for basing these migrations from the outdated out-of-Sundaland model of the Austronesian expansion.
Subsequently, the Tagalogs made contact with the Kapampangans, Sambal people and the Hatang Kayi, of which contact with the Kapampangans was most intensive.
Barangay period
Tagalog and other Philippine histories in general are highly speculative before the 10th century, primarily due to lack of written sources. Most information on precolonial Tagalog culture is documented by observational writings by early Spanish explorers in the mid-16th century, alongside few precedents from indirect Portuguese accounts and archaeological finds.The maritime-oriented barangays of pre-Hispanic Tagalogs were shared with other coastal peoples throughout the Philippine archipelago. The roughly three-tiered Tagalog social structure of maginoo, timawa/''maharlika, and alipin have almost identical cognates in Visayan, Sulu, and Mindanawon societies. Most barangays were networked almost exclusively by sea traffic, while smaller scale inland trade was typified as lowlander-highlander affairs. Barangays, like other Philippine settlements elsewhere, practiced seasonal sea raiding for vengeance, slaves, and valuables alongside headhunting, except for the relatively larger suprabarangay bayan'' of the Pasig River delta that served as a hub for slave trading. Such specialization also applied to other large towns like Cebu, Butuan, Jolo, and Cotabato.
Tagalog barangays, especially around Manila Bay, were typically larger than most Philippine polities due to a largely flat geography of their environment hosting extensive irrigated rice agriculture and particularly close trade relations with Brunei, Malacca, China, Champa, Siam, and Japan, from direct proximity to the South China Sea tradewinds. Such characteristics gave early Spanish impressions of Tagalogs as "more traders than warriors," although raids were practiced. Neighboring Kapampangan barangays also shared these characteristics.
10th–13th centuries
Although at the periphery of the larger Maritime Silk Road like much of Borneo, Sulawesi and eastern Indonesia, notable influences from Hinduism and Buddhism were brought to southwest Luzon and other parts of the Philippine archipelago by largely intermediate Bornean, Malay, Cham, and Javanese traders by this time period, likely much earlier. The earliest document in Tagalog and general Philippine history is the Laguna copperplate inscription, bearing several place names speculated to be analogous to several towns and barangays in predominantly Tagalog areas ranging from present-day Bulacan to coastal Mindoro.The text is primarily in Old Malay and shows several cultural and societal insights into the Tagalogs during time period. The earliest recognized Tagalog polity is Tondo, mentioned as Tundun, while several other place names are theorized to be present-day Pila or Paila, Bulacan, Pulilan, and Binuangan. Sanskrit, Malay, and Tagalog honorifics, names, accounting, and timekeeping were used. Chiefs were referred as either pamagat or tuhan, while dayang was likely female royalty. All of the aforementioned polities seemed to have close relations elsewhere with the polities of Dewata and Mdang, theorized to be the present-day area of Butuan in Mindanao and the Mataram kingdom in Java.
Additionally, several records from Song China and Brunei mention a particular polity called Ma-i, the earliest in 971. Several places within Tagalog-speaking areas contend for its location: Bulalacao, Bay, and Malolos. Ma-i had close trade relations with the Song, directly importing manufactured wares, iron, and jewelry and retailing to "other islands," evident of earlier possible Tagalog predominance of reselling Chinese goods throughout the rest of the Philippine islands before its explicit role by Maynila in the 16th century.
15th–16th centuries: Brunei and Malacca affairs
The growth of Malacca as the largest Southeast Asian entrepôt in the Maritime Silk Road led to a gradual spread of its cultural influence eastward throughout insular Southeast Asia. Malay became the regional lingua franca of trade and many polities enculturated Islamic Malay customs and governance to varying degrees, including Tagalogs and other coastal Philippine peoples. According to Bruneian folklore, at around 1500 Sultan Bolkiah launched a successful northward expedition to break Tondo's monopoly as a regional entrepot of the Chinese trade and established Maynila across the Pasig delta, ruled by his heirs as a satellite. Subsequently, Bruneian influence spread elsewhere around Manila Bay, present-day Batangas, and coastal Mindoro through closer trade and political relations, with a growing Tagalog-Kapampangan diaspora based in Brunei and beyond in Malacca in various professions as traders, sailors, shipbuilders, mercenaries, governors, and slaves.The Pasig delta bayan of Tondo-Maynila was the largest entrepot within the Philippine archipelago primarily from retailing Chinese and Japanese manufactured goods and wares throughout Luzon, the Visayan islands, Palawan, Sulu, and Maguindanao. Tagalog and Kapampangan traders also worked elsewhere as far as Timor and Canton. Bruneian, Malay, Chinese, Japanese, Siamese, Khmer, Cham, and traders from the rest of the Philippine archipelago alike all conducted business in Maynila, and to a lesser extent along the Batangas and Mindoro coasts. However, in a broader scope of Southeast Asian trade the bayan served a niche regional market comparable to smaller trade towns in Borneo, Sulawesi, and Maluku.