English language in the Philippines
| Philippine English | |
|---|---|
| Region | Philippines |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
| Glottolog | None |
Philippine English is any variety of English (similar and related to American English) native to the Philippines, including those used by the media and the vast majority of educated Filipinos. English is taught in schools as one of the two official languages of the country, the other being Filipino (Tagalog). Code-switching is prevalent in informal situations.
Philippine laws and court decisions, with extremely rare exceptions, are written solely in English. English is also used in higher education, religious affairs, print and broadcast media, and business. Most educated Filipinos are bilinguals and speak English as one of their languages. Still, for highly technical subjects such as nursing, medicine, computing and calculus, English is the preferred medium for textbooks, communication, etc. Very few would prefer highly technical books in the vernacular. Movies and TV shows in English are usually not dubbed in most cable channels except a few such as Tagalized Movie Channel.
Because English is part of the curricula from primary to secondary education, many Filipinos write and speak in fluent Philippine English, although there might be differences in diction and pronunciation. Most schools in the Philippines, however, are staffed by teachers who are speakers of Philippine English and hence notable differences from the American English from which it was derived are observable.
Philippine English traditionally followed American English spelling and grammar, except when it comes to punctuation as well as date notations. For example, a comma almost never precedes the final item in an enumeration (much like the AP Stylebook and other style guides used in the English-speaking world). Except for some very fluent speakers (like news anchors), even in English-language media, dates are also often read with a cardinal instead of an ordinal number (e.g. "January one" instead of "January first") even if the written form is the same. This is mostly because educated Filipinos were taught to count English numbers cardinally, thus it carried over to their style of reading dates. In military-style (or sometimes officialese) date notation (e.g. 1 January) the American standard is mostly followed, that is "one January".
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