Philippine Languages
About 110 distinct Philippine languages are spoken in the Philippines, an archipelago off the southeastern coast of mainland China, by 73 million Filipinos. The Philippine languages belong to the Western Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family, whose members include languages spoken in areas as far north as Hawaii and as far south as New Zealand, covering the area from Easter Island in South America to Madagascar off the coast of Africa. Within the language family, the Philippine languages are most closely related to the languages of Kalimantan, Sumatra, and Sulawesi in Indonesia; Sarawak and Sabah in Malaysia; and the Malagasy language in Madagascar.
Subgroupings
The Philippine languages are generally classified into three large subgroups, namely: (1) the Northern Philippine languages, spoken by a number of ethnolinguistic groups in the northern and central Luzon regions; (2) the Meso-Philippine languages, spoken by a large number of ethnolinguistic groups, more widely dispersed in the vast area from central to southern Luzon, parts of Mindoro and Palawan, the Visayan Islands, and parts of Mindanao; and (3) the Southern Philippine languages, spoken in parts of Zamboanga, Lanao, and Maguindanao. A number of languages belong to smaller subgroups: (4) the Ivatan languages, spoken on the northernmost islands of Batanes and Babuyan; (5) the Sama languages, spoken in the southern parts of Zamboanga and the islands of Sulu, Tawi-tawi, and Basilan; (6) the South Mindanao languages, spoken in parts of Davao, South Cotabato, and Maguindanao; and (7) Sangil, spoken in Balut and the Sarangani Islands of Davao del Sur.
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