“Where are you from?” in every Philippine language
Where are you from? across 9 languages, and what the differences tell you.
Last updated
Side by side
| Language | Where are you from? |
|---|---|
| English | Where are you from? |
| Tagalog | Taga-saan ka? |
| Ilocano | Taga-anoka? |
| Cebuano | Taga-asa ka? |
| Hiligaynon | Taga-diin ka? |
| Waray | Taga-hain ka? |
| Bikol | Taga-sain ka? |
| Kapampangan | Taga-nokarin ka? |
| Pangasinan | Taga-iner ka? |
What the pattern shows
Same frame, eight different question words bolted onto it. This single row is the clearest illustration of why machine translation between these languages fails: the shared 'taga-' makes the sentence look translatable while the word that carries the meaning is unique to each.
No two languages here use the same word. That is unusual even on this list, and it is the clearest possible answer to whether these are dialects of one another.
More introductions
Where this comes from
This row is one of 84 concept pages drawn from a parallel set of everyday vocabulary held across nine languages. You can browse all of them, download the whole set under CC BY-SA 4.0, or paste text to find out which language it is.
Compiled from published general reference and pending review by native speakers. If something here is wrong in a language you speak, please tell us.