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A theme that comes up a lot in relation to Tagalog is why learn it if everyone already speaks English? It's something I've considered a lot, and a question I have a lot of thoughts on, which we'll cover from different angles over the course of the next year. The real answer is that it's impossible to truly connect with Filipinos, or understand Filipino culture, without speaking the language. But today I just want to stay at the surface, with the grammar.

One reason people are less inclined to learn Tagalog these days is that Taglish is everywhere, especially in Manila, and especially in white-collar, middle-class and upper-class circles. If English isn't being spoken, it's usually something close to what people would call Taglish. In a big city like Davao, where a lot of people have come from somewhere else to work, combinations of three or more languages are understood and accepted without anyone blinking. Mixing Tagalog and Bisaya in the same sentence, with English in there too, is perfectly normal.

And then there's conyo, from the Spanish swear word coño. It's the label for a particular way of speaking Taglish associated with wealthy, English-dominant young people at expensive schools — English as the base with Tagalog dropped in, often through constructions like make plus a Tagalog verb: let's make pasok na for let's go in, or it's so sarap for it's so delicious. Saying someone is speaking conyo is rarely a compliment. The stereotype carries a lot of class baggage, which is worth knowing — and it's another clear signal that Tagalog using English words, or Taglish, is not Tagalog becoming English.

Here's what the research actually shows. The linguist Maria Lourdes Bautista drew a line between code-switching that happens because someone is missing a language and code-switching that happens because someone has both and is moving between them for speed and effect. Educated Taglish is overwhelmingly the second kind — a deliberate thing that fluent bilinguals do because it is faster and lands better, not a crutch. It isn't Tagalog thinning out into English. English supplies a lot of the words, but more importantly, Tagalog supplies the frame holding them up.

It looks like English, but it is not. Colleagues will say something like Sige po, nag-lo-login na ako, and I'd read the work WhatsApp group and think: that's not real. That can't be real. But no — it's real, and it is as Tagalog as any deep root you'll learn in a Tagalog lesson. Nag-lo-login na ako and mag-se-send na ako ng email are perfectly normal and grammatically correct Tagalog. They are not English.

Outsiders looking in see this and assume Taglish is just English with more English poured in every year, until it's basically English with a few na's and talaga's and oo's sprinkled on top. It isn't like that at all, and here's one of many examples that made me understand why.

A few weeks ago in Mati, someone asked whether I spoke Tagalog and Bisaya. I said konti lang ng Tagalog ko — roughly, just a little, my Tagalog. What I wanted to say next was that they could speak Tagalog to me, but slowly, as if I were a child. What actually came out was paki mabagal ang salitang mo — understood, maybe, as for your words slow please — and then ako ay ang bata sa Tagalog. Anyone three weeks into Tagalog lessons could spot about ten grammatical errors across those two sentences.

The correct sentence was “Para akong bata mag-Tagalog.”

Mine translates as I am a child in Tagalog. Theirs, word for word, is same I child speaking Tagalog. Completely different structure, completely different way of communicating, completely different way of processing the information — four words carrying what English needs nine to say.

Tagalog sentence structure, taken literally, makes no sense in English at all. Look at this one:

• TagalogGusto kong makita ang mukha mo pag kumain ka ng durian.what you'd actually say
• What it meansI want to see your face when you eat durian.the natural English
• Word for wordWant mine to-be-seen the face yours when ate you of durian.the structure underneath

Haha. What.

So why does any of this matter? Because foreigners hear mag-surf, mag-flirt, mag-chismis and think: “ah, fine, I'll just speak mostly English and mag- the odd English words here and there and that's pretty much modern Tagalog.” It doesn't work like that. You can't use mag-surf correctly until you could also say para akong bata mag-surf, or Gusto kong mag-surf sa Siargao. Or say nag-lo-login na ako with the na in the correct place. You're hearing English mixed in, but underneath it nothing about the structure is English, and a sentence that ignores that structure doesn't flow.

This is true even when the sentence is mostly English with nothing more than a na or a pa in it. Without the particle it lands as a jarring English sentence dropped into a Tagalog conversation. With it, the conversation flows as Taglish should. And putting the na in the wrong place does exactly as much damage as leaving it out. Which is why Tagalog grammar probably matters more now than it ever has, if you actually want to sound like a Filipino — English words or not.

Two concepts are doing the work in nag-lo-login na ako, and neither of them is English. One is the affix on the front. The other is that two-letter word near the end.

First, the affix carries the tense. English marks time on the word itself — send, sent, sending. Tagalog does it with a prefix and by repeating the first syllable of the root, and it does this to any root you hand it, including an English one.

• mag-sendto send — the plain form
• nag-sendsent — done, finished
• nag-se-sendis sending — started, still going
• mag-se-sendwill send — not started yet

That repeated syllable is the whole trick. Nag- means it happened; the doubled se means it isn't finished. So the grid is: prefix tells you whether it started, doubling tells you whether it ended. Same machine on login: mag-login, nag-login, nag-lo-login, mag-lo-login. And on a native root it's identical — magluto, nagluto, nagluluto, magluluto. The only reason the English ones carry hyphens is that the root keeps its English spelling, which is the same rule that gives us nag-jogging and pinaka-talented.

And none of this is new. Magtsismis, to gossip, is Tagalog affixes wrapped around chisme, a Spanish word. So is magdasal, to pray. Tagalog has been doing precisely this to foreign roots for four hundred years. Mag-se-send is not the language giving way to English; it's the language doing the thing it has always done, to a newer set of words.

Second, na and pa handle whether the situation has changed. This is the part that has no English equivalent.

• Nag-lo-login na ako.I'm logging in now — I wasn't, now I am
• Nag-lo-login pa ako.I'm still logging in — nothing has changed yet
• Tapos na.Done now.
• Hindi pa.Not yet.
• Kumain ka na?Have you eaten?

Na says a threshold has been crossed. Pa says it hasn't. Almost every English speaker learning Tagalog reaches for already and still, drops them in as whole words, and in the process sounds conyo as f*ck. These two syllables are doing that job, and they do it in the middle of a sentence rather than at the end. Most importantly, it's real Tagalog.

This is also why Kumain ka na? is not really “have you eaten?” so much as “are you at the point of having eaten yet?” It's a question about a threshold, which is why the honest answer is hindi pa — not a no, just a not-yet.

None of this happened in isolation. The Philippines has been global for a very long time, and the language shows it in both directions.

Start with the people. There were about 2.19 million overseas Filipino workers in 2024, and roughly a fifth of them were in Saudi Arabia alone. Almost everyone here has a parent, a sibling, a cousin or a best friend working abroad, and language comes back down those lines.

You'd be surprised how many Filipinos who have never left the country know yalla, Arabic for come on, let's go, or habibi, my dear — used for friends as readily as for lovers. It arrived with phone calls, video calls and Facebook Messenger from Dubai and other parts of the Middle East.

And it runs the other way too. Kilig went into the Oxford English Dictionary in 2016. You'd be blown away by how many people in LA or other parts of southern California know and use that word like it has always been part of the English language. And almost any child under 18 that I meet in the Philippines now speaks fluent English, regardless of where I am, city or province. That's what you'd expect from a generation raised on YouTube and TikTok, and it's a great thing.

But none of this should be read as a culture being lost, or a reason to abandon Tagalog entirely. This is the Filipino culture integrating with a global world on its own terms — the same way it absorbed three centuries of Spanish, kept its own grammar, and carried on. A Filipino who says mag-se-send na ako has not swapped anything out. They've picked up a new word and run it through a culture and a language spanning hundreds of years of modern history.

So when someone tells you everyone here speaks English, yes, that's correct, and it's becoming more true every year. It just doesn't settle the question. English is one slice of a very large pie, and the rest of it — the part where you actually connect with people — is still in Tagalog.