World Language Map

Where is Filipino spoken?

Filipino is an Austronesian language, spoken in the Philippines, the United States, Canada and Macau. It is marked on the map by a ringed point.

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The filter only changes what is drawn. Tap the map to list every language at a spot, whichever family is shown. You can also pick any family from its own page.

Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

  • All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Filipino is spoken

Filipino is spoken in 4 countries: the Philippines, the United States, Canada and Macau. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Philippines60%70,966,200
United States0.4%1,436,245
Canada2%775,896
Macau3.1%19,977

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

Filipino has no area on the map because no open area map covers it. The ringed point is the position Glottolog gives for the language.

How many people speak Filipino?

Wikidata gives about 90 million speakers (Wikidata, with no source given). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where Filipino sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Filipino as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Austronesian
  2. Malayo-Polynesian
  3. Greater Central Philippine
  4. Central Philippine
  5. Tagalogic
  6. Tagalog-Filipino
  7. Filipino

Related languages

Other languages in the Tagalog-Filipino group:

More about Filipino

Codes: ISO 639-3 fil, Glottolog fili1244. Glottolog macroarea: Papunesia.

Questions about Filipino

Where is Filipino spoken?

Filipino is spoken in the Philippines, the United States, Canada and Macau. Unicode CLDR puts it at 60% of the population of Philippines, which is about 70,966,200 people. On the map it is shown as a single point, because no open area map covers it.

How many people speak Filipino?

Wikidata gives about 90 million speakers (Wikidata, with no source given). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.

Which language family is Filipino in?

Glottolog places Filipino in the Austronesian family, in the branch Malayo-Polynesian, Greater Central Philippine, Central Philippine, Tagalogic and Tagalog-Filipino.

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