Tagalog language

Austronesian language spoken in the PhilippinesA Tagalog speaker, recorded in South Africa.Tagalog ( ; native pronunciation:; Baybayin: ᜆᜄᜎᜓᜄ᜔) is an Austronesian language spoken as a first language by the ethnic Tagalog people, who make up a quarter of the population of the Philippines, and as a second language by the majority. Its standardized and codified form, Filipino, is the national language of the Philippines, and is one language of the nation's two official languages, alongside English. Tagalog, like other Austronesian languages, commonly uses verb-subject-object order, but can also use subject-verb-object order. Tagalog follows the trigger system of morphosyntactic alignment that is common among Philippine languages. It has head-initial directionality. It is an agglutinative language but can also display inflection. It is not a tonal language and can be considered a pitch-accent language and a syllable-timed language. It has nine basic parts of speech. Tagalog is closely related to other Philippine languages, such as the Bikol languages, the Bisayan languages, Ilocano, Kapampangan, and Pangasinan, and more distantly to other Austronesian languages, such as the