Filipino (;
Pilipino or
Wikang Filipino) is the
national language of the
Philippines and is designated, along with
English, as an
official language of the country. It is the
standard register of the
Tagalog language, an
Austronesian,
regional language that is widely spoken in the Philippines. As of 2007, Tagalog is the
first language of 28 million people, or about one-third of the
Philippine population, while 45 million speak Filipino as their
second language. Filipino is among the 185
languages of the Philippines identified in the
Ethnologue. Officially, Filipino is defined by the
Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino (Commission on the Filipino Language or simply KWF) as "the native language, spoken and written, in
Metro Manila, the National Capital Region, and in other urban centers of the archipelago." Filipino is ideally a
pluricentric language. Indeed, there have been observed "emerging varieties of Filipino which deviate from the grammatical properties of Tagalog" in
Davao City and
Cebu, which together with Metro Manila form the three largest metropolitan areas in the Philippines. In reality, however, Filipino has been variously described as "simply Tagalog in syntax and grammar, with no grammatical element or lexicon coming from ... other major Philippine languages," and as "essentially a formalized version of Tagalog." In most contexts, Filipino is understood to be an alternative name for Tagalog, or the Metro Manila dialect of Tagalog.