Group	Filipino people
Pop	103,000,000
Region1
Pop1	92,000,000
Region2
Pop2	3,053,179
Region3
Pop3	1,066,401
Region4
Pop4	636,544
Region5
Pop5	529,114
Region6
Pop6	410,695
Region7
Pop7	305,972
Region8
Pop8	203,035
Region9
Pop9	195,558
Region10
Pop10	139,802
Region11
Pop11	130,810
Region12
Pop12	129,400
Region13
Pop13	120,192
Region14
Pop14	63,464
Region15
Pop15	70,000
Region16
Pop16	40,000
Region17
Pop17	16,938
Region18
Pop18	16,000
Region19
Pop19	12,262
Region20
Pop20	12,000
Region21
Pop21	3,000
Languages	Philippine languages, English; Spanish, Arabic.
Religions	Christianity (predominantly Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism), Islam, Buddhism, Traditional and folk religions and other religion.
Related	other Southeast Asians and Austronesian-speaking people. }}

The Filipino people are an ethnic group primarily located in the Philippines. There are about 92 million Filipinos in the Philippines, and about 11 million living outside the Philippines. Most Filipinos refer to themselves colloquially as ''"Pinoy"'' (feminine: ''"Pinay"''), which is a slang word formed by taking the last four letters of ''"Pilipino"'' and adding the diminutive suffix ''"-y"''. The lack of the letter ''"F"'' in the pre-1987 Philippine alphabet, Abakada, had caused the letter ''"F"'' to be substituted with ''"P"''. This is why, when the 28-letter modern Filipino alphabet was made official in 1987, the name ''Filipino'' was preferred over ''Pilipino''. The name ''Filipino'' was chosen by the Spanish explorer Ruy López de Villalobos, who named the islands "las Islas Filipinas" ("the Philippine Islands") after Philip II of Spain.

History

Pre - Colonial:

In 2010, a metatarsal from "Callao Man" discovered in 2007 was dated through uranium-series dating as being 67,000 years old. Prior to that, the earliest human remains found in the Philippines were thought to be the fossilized fragments of a skull and jawbone, discovered in the 1960s by Dr. Robert B. Fox, a North American anthropologist of the National Museum. Anthropologists who examined these remains agreed that they belonged to modern human beings. These include the ''homo sapiens'', as distinguished from the mid-Pleistocene ''homo erectus'' species. The Tabon man fossils are considered to have come from a third group of inhabitants, who worked the cave between 22,000 and 20,000 BCE. An earlier cave level lies so far below the level containing cooking fire assemblages that it must represent Upper Pleistocene dates like 45 or 50 thousand years ago. Researchers say this indicates that the human remains were pre-Mongoloid, from about 40,000 years ago. Mongoloid is the term which anthropologists applied to the ethnic group which migrated to Southeast Asia during the Holocene period and evolved into the Austronesian people (associated with the Haplogroup O1 (Y-DNA) genetic marker), a group of Malayo-Polynesian-speaking people including those from Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Malagasy, parts of Vietnam as well as the non-Han Chinese Taiwanese Aboriginals. Anthropologist F. Landa Jocano of the University of the Philippines, in 2001 postulates that the present indigenous Filipinos are products of the long process of evolution and movement of people.

Fluctuations in ancient shorelines between 150,000 BP and 17,000 BP connected to the Malay archipelago region with Maritime Southeast Asia and the Philippines. This may have enabled ancient migrations into the Philippines from Maritime Southeast Asia approximately 50,000 BP to 13,000 BP.

A January 2009 study of language phylogenies by R. D. Gray at UCLA published in Science (journal), suggests that the population expansion of Austronesian peoples was triggered by rising sea levels of the Sunda shelf at the end of the last ice age in a two-pronged expansion, which moved north through the Philippines and into Taiwan, while a second expansion prong spread east along the New Guinea coast and into Oceania and Polynesia.

The Negritos are likely descendants of the indigenous populations of the Sunda landmass and New Guinea, predating the Mongoloid peoples who later entered Southeast Asia. Multiple studies also show that Negritos from Southeast Asia to New Guinea share a closer cranial affinity with Australo-Melanesians. They were the ancestors of such tribes of the Philippines as the Aeta, Agta, Ayta, Ati, Dumagat and other tribes of the Philippines, today making up .03% of the total Philippine population.

The majority of present day Filipinos are a product of the long process of evolution and movement of people. After the mass migrations through land bridges, Migrations continue by boat during the maritime era of South East Asia. The Ancient races became homogenized into the Malayo-Polynesians which colonized the majority of the Philippine, Malaysian and Indonesian Archipelagos.

Since at least the 3rd century, various ethnic groups established several communities. These were formed by the assimilation of various native Philippine kingdoms. South Asian and East Asian people together with the people of the Indonesian Archipelago and the Malay Peninsula, traded with Filipinos and introduced and passed Hinduism and Buddhism to the native tribes of the Philippines. Most of these people stayed in the Philippines where they were slowly absorbed into the local society.

Many of the ''barangay'' (tribal municipalities) were, to a varying extent, under the ''de-jure'' jurisprudence of one of several neighboring empires, among them the Malay Sri Vijaya, Javanese Majapahit, Brunei, Melaka, Indian Chola, Persia, Arabia, Seljuq/TurkishOttoman, Greece, Funan, Champa, and khmer empires, although ''de-facto'' had established their own independent system of rule. Trading links with Sumatra, Borneo, Java, Malay Peninsula, Indochina, China, India, Arabia, Japan and the Ryukyu Kingdom flourished during this era. A thalassocracy had thus emerged based on international trade.

Even scattered barangays, through the development of inter-island and international trade, became more culturally homogeneous by the 4th century.Hindu-Buddhist culture and religion flourished among the noblemen in this era.

In the period between the 7th to the beginning of the 15th centuries, numerous prosperous centers of trade had emerged, including the Kingdom of Namayan which flourished alongside Manila Bay, Cebu, Iloilo, Butuan, the Kingdom of Sanfotsi situated in Pangasinan, the Kingdom of Luzon now known as Pampanga which specialized in trade with China, Japan and the Kingdom of Ryukyu in Okinawa, and most of what is now known as South East Asia.

From the 9th century onwards, a large number of Arab traders from the Middle East settled in the Malay Archipelago and intermarried with the local Malay, Indonesian and Filipino populations.

In the years leading up to 1000 C.E., there were already several maritime societies existing in the islands but there was no unifying political state encompassing the entire Philippine archipelago. Instead, the region was dotted by numerous semi-autonomous ''barangays'' (settlements ranging is size from villages to city-states) under the sovereignty of competing thalassocracies ruled by datus, rajahs or sultans or by upland agricultural societies ruled by "petty plutocrats". States such as the Kingdom of Maynila and Namayan, the Dynasty of Tondo, the Confederation of Madyaas, the rajahnates of Butuan and Cebu and the sultanates of Maguindanao and Sulu existed alongside the highland societies of the Ifugao and Mangyan. Some of these regions were part of the Malayan empires of Srivijaya, Majapahit and Brunei.

Ethnic Chinese sailed down and frequently interacted and even created settlements including CALABARZON region such as Rizal in the northern regions of the Philippines, which carried on trade with the Arab merchants long before the Spanish colonization. This is evidenced by a collection of priceless Chinese artifacts found in the Philippines, dating to the 10th century.

By the 13th century, Arab and Indian Missionaries/Traders from present-day Malaysia and Indonesia brought Islam to the Philippines, where it both replaced and was practiced together with indigenous religions. Most indigenous tribes of the Philippines practiced a mixture of Animism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam. Native villages, called ''barangays'' were populated by locals called Timawa (Middle Class/ freemen) and Alipin (servants & slaves). They were ruled by Rajahs, Datus and Sultans, a class called Maginoo (royals) and defended by the Maharlika (Lesser nobles, royal warriors and aristocrats). It is scientifically proven that these Royals and Nobles are descended from Native Filipinos with varying degrees of Indo-aryan, East Asian, Dravidian, Arab and even Greek ancestry which is evident in today's DNA analysis among South East Asian Royals who mostly claim their ancestry from way back to the Alexandrian Era. This tradition continued among the Spanish and Portuguese traders who also intermarried with the local populations.

Colonial influence:

The arrival of Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan in 1521 began a period of European colonization. During the period of Spanish colonialism beginning in the 16th century, the Philippines was governed by Mexico City on behalf of the Spanish Empire. Early Spanish settlers were mostly explorers, soldiers, government officials and religious missionaries born in Spain and Mexico. Most Spaniards who settled were of Andalusian ancestry but there were also Catalonians, Moorish and Basques descents. The ''Peninsulares'' (governors born in Spain), mostly of Castilian ancestry, settled in the islands to govern their territory. Intermarriage between Spaniards and Filipinos occurred, but was not as common as in the Americas. Most settlers married the daughters of rajahs, datus and sultans (chieftains) to reinforce the colonization of the islands, while some married only other Spaniards. Today, there are still a few Filipino families who maintain a pure Spanish or European ancestry. Prehistoric evidence attest that most datus, rajahs and sultans or maharlikas (nobles and royals) in the Philippines prior to the arrival of the Spaniards were of mixed indigenous Filipino, Indo-Aryan and Chinese ancestry. They formed the privileged Principalia (nobility) during the Spanish period. In the 16th and 17th centuries, thousands of Japanese traders also migrated to the Philippines and assimilated into the local population.

As a part of the Seven years war; the British conquest of the Spanish Philippines occurred between 1762 and 1764, although the only part of the Philippines which was under British control was actually occupied in the Spanish colonial capital of Manila with the principal Spanish naval port Cavite, both of whom are located in Manila Bay. The war was ended by the Treaty of Paris (1763). The treaty signatories were not aware that the Philippines had been taken by the British and was being administered as a British colony. Consequently no specific provision was made for the Philippines. Instead they fell under the general provision that all other lands not otherwise provided for be returned to the Spanish Empire. Many Indian Sepoy troops and their British captains mutinied and were left in Manila and some parts of the Ilocos and Cagayan. The ones in Manila settled at Cainta, Rizal and the ones at the north settled at Isabela. Most of which assimilated into the local population.

The arrival of the Spaniards to the Philippines attracted new waves of immigrants from China, and maritime trade flourished during the Spanish period. The Spanish recruited thousands of Chinese migrant workers called ''sangleys'' to build the colonial infrastructure in the islands. Most Chinese immigrants converted to Christianity, intermarried with the locals, and adopted Hispanized names and customs. The children of unions between Filipinos and Chinese were called Mestizos de Sangley or Chinese mestizos, while those between Spaniards and Chinese were called Tornatrás, and were grouped together with the mixed-race Filipinos of Spanish descent. The Chinese mestizos were largely confined to the Binondo area. However, they eventually spread all over the islands, and became traders, moneylenders and landowners.

A total of 110 Manila-Acapulco galleons set sail between 1565 to 1815, during the Philippines trade with Mexico. Until 1593, three or more ships would set sail annually from each port. European criollos, mestizos and mulattos of Spanish, Portuguese, French and Mexican descent from the Americas, mostly from Latin America came in contact with the Filipinos. Japanese, Korean and Cambodian Christians who fled from religious persecutions and killing fields also settled in the Philippines during the 17th until the 19th centuries.

With the inauguration of the Suez Canal in 1867, Spain opened the Philippines for international trade. European investors such as British, German, Portuguese, Italian and French were among those who settled in the islands as business increased. More Spaniards arrived during the next century. Many of these European migrants intermarried with local mestizos and some assimilated with the indigenous population. Their enterprises became the precursors of the current Chinese and oriental dominated major corporations and conglomerates of the country. After the defeat of Spain during the Spanish-American War in 1898, Filipino general, Emilio Aguinaldo declared independence on June 12 while general Wesley Merritt became the first American governors of the Philippines. On December 10, 1898, the Treaty of Paris formally ended the war, with Spain ceding the Philippines and other colonies to the United States in exchange for $20 million dollars. After the Philippine–American War, the United States civil governance was established in 1901, with William Howard Taft as the first American Governor-General. A number of Americans settled in the islands and thousands of interracial marriages between Americans and Filipinos have taken place since then. Due to the strategic location of the Philippines, as many as 21 bases and 100,000 military personnel were stationed there since the United States first colonized the islands in 1898. These bases were decommissioned in 1992 after the end of the Cold War, but left behind thousands of Amerasian children. The country gained independence from the United States in 1946. The Pearl S. Buck International foundation estimates there are 52,000 Amerasians scattered throughout the Philippines. In addition, numerous Filipino men enlisted in the US Navy and made careers in it, often settling with their families in the United States. Some of their second or third generation-families returned to the country.

Following its independence, the Philippines has seen both small and large-scale immigration into the country, mostly involving Chinese, Americans, British, Europeans, Japanese. After WWII, South Asians continued to migrate into the islands. Most of which assimilated and avoided the local social stigma instilled by the early Spaniards against them by keeping a low profile and/or by trying to pass as Spanish mestizos. More recent migrations into the country by Koreans, Persians, Brazilians and other Southeast Asians have contributed to the enrichment of the country's ethnic landscape, language and culture. Centuries of migration, diaspora, assimilation, and cultural diversity made most Filipinos open-minded in embracing interracial marriage and multiculturalism. Philippine nationality law is currently based upon the principles of your place of birth or origin, and therefore descent from a parent who is a citizen of the Republic of the Philippines is the primary method of acquiring national citizenship. Birth in the Philippines to foreign parents does not in itself confer Philippine citizenship, although RA9139, the Administrative Naturalization Law of 2000, does provide a path for administrative naturalization of certain illegal citizens born in the Philippines.

Together, some of these recent foreign immigrants have intermarried with the Filipinos, as well as with the previous immigrant groups, giving rise to Filipinos of mixed racial and/or ethnic origins also known as mestizos.

Genetic studies

The Philippine Government has never conducted any recent genetic study of great statistical significance about the ancestry of the various Philippine ethnic groups, there have been some studies, based upon very small samples of the population, which provide clues as to their origins. The affordability of DNA testing kits for Y-DNA and mtDNA haplogroup verification has spurred the proliferation of public DNA databases such as those hosted by genetic genealogy companies. A Stanford University study conducted during 2001 revealed that Haplogroup O3-M122 (labeled as "Haplogroup L" in this study) is the most common Y-chromosome DNA haplogroup found among Filipinos. This particular haplogroup is also predominant among Chinese, Koreans, and Vietnamese. Another haplogroup, Haplogroup O1a-M119 (labeled as "Haplogroup H" in this study), is also found among Filipinos. The rates of Haplogroup O1a are highest among the Taiwanese aborigines, and Chamic-speaking people. Genetic data found among a sampling of Filipinos may indicate some relation to the Ami tribe of Taiwan.

A 2008 genetic study showed no evidence of a large-scale Taiwanese migration into the Philippine Islands. A study by Leeds University and published in Molecular Biology and Evolution, showed that mitochondrial DNA lineages have been evolving within Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) since modern humans arrived approximately 50,000 years ago. Population dispersals occurred at the same time as sea levels rose, which resulted in migrations from the Philippine Islands into Taiwan within the last 10,000 years.

A 2002 China Medical University study indicated that some Filipinos shared genetic chromosome that is found among Asian people, such as Taiwanese aborigines, Indonesians, Thais, and Chinese.

A variety of research study by the University of the Philippines, genetic chromosome were found in Filipinos which are shared by people from different parts of East Asia, and Southeast Asia. The predominant genotype detected was SC, the Southeast Asian genotype.

''Sinodonty'' and ''Sundadonty'' are two patterns, identified by anthropologist Christy Turner, for East Asia, within the "Mongoloid dental complex". The latter is regarded as having a more generalised, Australoid morphology and having a longer ancestry than its offspring, ''Sinodonty''. He found the ''Sundadont'' pattern in the Jōmon of Japan, Taiwanese aborigines, Filipinos, Indonesians, Thais, Borneans, Laotians, and Malaysians, and the ''Sinodont'' pattern in the inhabitants of China, Mongolia, eastern Siberia, Native Americans, and the Yayoi. Both of patterns are common among indigenous Filipino tribes. Other dental patterns are also found among City dwellers as a result of mixed racial ancestry.

These indigenous elements in the Filipino's genetic makeup serve as clues to the patterns of migration throughout Philippine history. After the 16th century, of course, the colonial period saw the influx of genetic influence from Europeans. During the above mentioned study conducted by Stanford University Asia-Pacific Research Center, it was stated that 3.6% European introgression out of 28 samples was evident in the Philippines.

Languages

Austronesian languages have been spoken in the Philippines for thousands of years with many adopted words from Sanskrit, Arabic, Mandarin, Mon–Khmer and other Asian languages. Starting in the second half of the 16th century, Spanish was the official language of the country for the more than three centuries that the islands were governed through Mexico City on behalf of the Spanish Empire. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Spanish and Tagalog were the preferred languages among ''Ilustrados'' and educated Filipinos in general. Significant disagreement exists, however, on the extent Spanish use beyond that. It has been argued that the Philippines were less hispanized than Canaries and America, with Spanish only being adopted by the ruling class involved in civil and judicial administration and culture. Spanish was the language of only approximately ten percent of the Philippine population when Spanish rule ended in 1898. As a lingua franca or creole language of Filipinos, major languages of the country like Pangasinan, Chavacano, Cebuano, Tagalog, Kapampangan, Bicolano, Hiligaynon, and Ilocano assimilated many different words and expressions from Castilian Spanish.

In sharp contrast, another view is that the ratio of the population which spoke Spanish as their ''mother tongue'' in the last decade of Spanish rule was 10% or 14%. An additional 60% is said to have spoken Spanish as a second language until World War II. Various sources reported the widespread use of Spanish by the Philippine population, among them the secretary of education during the period of US rule, as well as Henry Ford, who reported what he observed and the Filipino speech that he heard in his travels through the archipelago, sixteen of whose provinces where said to be Spanish-speaking in 1906.

In 1863 a Spanish decree introduced universal education, creating free public schooling in Spanish. It was also the language of the Philippine Revolution, and the 1899 Malolos Constitution proclaimed it as the "official language" of the First Philippine Republic. Following the American occupation of the Philippines and the imposition of English, the overall use of Spanish declined gradually, especially after the 1940s. According to Ethnologue, there are about 180 languages spoken in the Philippines. The Constitution of the Philippines designates Filipino (which is based on Tagalog) as the national language and designates both Filipino and English as official languages. Regional languages are designated as auxiliary official languages. The constitution also provides that Spanish and Arabic shall be promoted on a voluntary and optional basis.

Other Philippine languages in the country with at least 320,000 native speakers include Cebuano, Ilocano, Hiligaynon, Waray-Waray, Kapampangan, Chavacano (Spanish creole), Northern Bicol, Pangasinan, Southern Bicol, Maranao, Maguindanao, Kinaray-a, Tausug, Surigaonon, Masbatenyo, Aklanon, and Ibanag. The 28-letter modern Filipino alphabet, adopted in 1987, is the official writing system.

Diaspora

Filipinos form a minority ethnic group in the Americas, Europe, Oceania, the Middle East, and other countries in the world.

There are an estimated four million Americans of Filipino ancestry in the United States, and more than 300,000 American citizens in the Philippines.

Filipinos make up about half of the entire population of the Northern Marianas Islands, an American territory in the North Pacific Ocean, and a large proportion of the populations of Guam, Palau, and the Malaysian state of Sabah.

See also

Demographics of the Philippines

Ethnic groups in the Philippines

Filipino psychology

Filipino value system

List of Filipinos

List of Filipino athletes

Publications

. ISBN 9789711002268. ARE - . AUS - . CAN - . GWM - . HKG - IRL - ITA - . JPN - . LBN - . NZL - . ROK - . SAU - . TWN - Alien Workers in Taiwan-Fukien Area by Industry and Nationality (JPG and PDF format), 2006 February, CLA, Taiwan.

USA

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References

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Category:Filipino people

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