Philippines: Language Situation

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This article presents a brief overview of the current linguistic situation in the Philippines, a linguistically diverse country with over 170 mutually unintelligible languages. The article includes a listing of most of the languages of the Philippines with their geographic details and 2000 census figures or Summer Institute of Linguistics estimates, wherever available. A brief history of the Philippine national language is provided as well as linguistic details of the educational system of this highly multilingual nation.

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Carl Rubino (b. 1968) is a typologist specializing in Philippine languages. He received his B.A. in Spanish from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of California, Santa Barbara for his Reference grammar of Ilocano in 1997. He has held diverse positions in academia and industry, including the Australian National University, University of California at Santa Barbara, Panasonic Speech Technologies, AnswerLogic.com, and ARTI. His publications include the following books: Ilocano dictionary and grammar, Tagalog standard dictionary (with grammatical outline), Encyclopedia of the world's major languages, past and present (with Jane Garry), and A pedagogical grammar of Tausug. He has also written numerous articles on typological issues, various Philippine languages, Malagasy, and Yup'ik Eskimo. He is currently working on machine-translation projects and documenting Utudnun, an undescribed Bisayan language spoken Leyte, Philippines. He lives in Maryland with his wife Grace and corgi Buster Brown.

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