Southeast Asian linguistic traditions in the Philippines

Abstract

The Philippines today is home to over one hundred different ethnolinguistic groups. These range from the Arta, a tiny group of Negrito hunter-gatherers with only about a dozen remaining speakers, living under highly adverse conditions in Quirino Province, to the 12,000,000 or so Tagalogs, a very diverse group primarily professing Catholicism, centered around Metro-Manila and surrounding provinces, but also widely dispersed throughout the archipelago. In between there are a wide range of traditional societies living in isolated areas, such as in the steep mountains of the Cordillera Central and the Sierra Madre of Northern Luzon, still attempting to follow their pre-Hispanic cultural practices amid the onslaught of modern civilization. And in the Southern Philippines there are the societies, who, having converted to Islam only shortly before Magellan arrived, today feel a closer allegiance to Mecca than they do to Manila. These peoples, despite the disparate nature of their cultures, all have one thing in common. They share a common linguistic tradition.