Revised Edition Expanded
by Renato Perdon
Revised by Imelda F. Gasmen
TUTTLE Publishing
Tokyo | Rutland, Vermont | Singapore
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Published by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd.
Copyright © 2008, 2016 Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd.
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ISBN 978-0-8048-4362-1; ISBN 978-1-4629-1843-0 (ebook)
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Contents
2 Quickies
15 Swardspeak
Introduction
Making Out in Tagalog is your passport to the living, breathing, colorful language spoken on the streets of the Philippines. It is the first easy book to give you access to the casual, unbuttoned Tagalog that will allow you to express yourself in restaurants, bars, and nightclubs, in crowded marketplaces, and at train and bus stations. Here you will find the warm-hearted language that you can use with new acquaintances, good friends or perhaps, a potential significant other, and also the rough-and-tumble language you can fall back on when you are ready to either attack or defend yourself or someone else in certain situations.
This brand of Tagalog is simple and direct. It is spoken mainly in Metro Manila, large cities, provincial capitals, and town centers but can be understood in most places in the Philippines. It has shed the complex grammatical twists and turns of the highly formal language that textbooks and language courses strive so hard to teach.
Making Out in Tagalog will be a useful companion throughout the Philippines—whether in cities, traveling in remote barrios or talking with Filipinos anywhere in the world. So you want to meet people, make friends, eat out, go dancing, or just engage in friendly chitchat? A quick glance at Making Out in Tagalog and you’ll have the language at your fingertips.
OVERVIEW
If you have spent several years grappling with the complicated grammatical structures of French, German, Italian or Spanish, you will find Tagalog, especially the informal version in this book, a joy.
Tagalog is the main language in Manila, the capital of the Philippines and its surrounding areas. It is the lingua franca of Filipinos in the Philippines as well as in other parts of the world. With over 150 languages and their various dialects, Filipinos in the Philippines as well as in other parts of the world use Tagalog as their lingua franca. By the way, Tagalog is recently considered the most spoken Southeast Asian language in the U.S. One of the eight major Philippine languages, Tagalog belongs to the Austronesian family of languages which includes Malay, Indonesian, and Hawaiian.
An easy-going language spoken today on the streets of the Philippines, Tagalog is one of the many local languages in the country that developed over the centuries as traders from different ethnic groups mixed and mingled from all parts of the world. From as early as the 12th century, Chinese and Arab traders flooded the language with their own vocabularies,