World Language Map

Where is Tagalog spoken?

Tagalog (wikang Tagalog) is an Austronesian language, spoken in the Philippines. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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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 Tagalog is spoken

Tagalog is spoken in one country: the Philippines.

Country
Philippines

On the map, Tagalog is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Tagalog.

How many people speak Tagalog?

Wikidata gives about 23.6 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). It also lists about 45 million second-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2013). 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 Tagalog sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Tagalog 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. Tagalog

Related languages

Other languages in the Tagalog-Filipino group:

More about Tagalog

Codes: ISO 639-3 tgl, Glottolog taga1270. Glottolog macroarea: Papunesia.

Questions about Tagalog

Where is Tagalog spoken?

Tagalog is spoken in the Philippines. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Tagalog?

Wikidata gives about 23.6 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled. It also lists about 45 million second-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2013).

Which language family is Tagalog in?

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

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