How Philippine Languages Are Actually Related

“Philippine languages” is a geographic label, not a linguistic one. The 8 languages this site covers are all Austronesian, but they sit on three separate branches, and two languages spoken a province apart can be further from each other than either is from a language on another island.

This is the single most useful thing to understand about them, because almost every intuition people bring — that neighbouring languages are similar, that they are all “dialects of Filipino”, that a Tagalog speaker can muddle through — is built on the geography rather than the tree.

English belongs to none of these. It is Indo-European, unrelated to all eight, and it matters here only because it is the language machine translation pivots through — including on this site.

Less than people expect. Here is one concept across all eight, and the branch boundaries are not where the words divide.

Water splits the group in a way the tree does not predict: Ilocano, Kapampangan and Pangasinan say danum, and they belong to three different branches. Tagalog sits on Luzon and sides with the Visayan languages instead.

To eat does the same thing. Ilocano, Kapampangan and Pangasinan all use mangan against the Visayan kaon — a genuine Luzon isogloss cutting across three separate branches, and one of the very few things those three share.

Shared vocabulary spreads by contact as well as by descent, which is why a family tree predicts grammar far better than it predicts words.

Three cases worth knowing, each with the measured figure attached — full results on the measurement page.

• Kapampangan and Tagalog. The provinces border each other and the languages are on different branches. Nanu for what, ninu for who, lagyu for name, wa for yes. Almost nothing is guessable from Tagalog, and the translation scores 62.7%.
• Ilocano and Pangasinan. Same branch, shared border, not mutually intelligible — agew against aldaw for day, abung against balay for house. Measured at 65.4%. Bilingualism in northern Pangasinan is common, which is a fact about people rather than about the languages.
• Cebuano and Hiligaynon. The closest pair on the site, and the machine handles them worse than it handles either with Tagalog — 43.2%. Relatedness is not what translation runs on; available text is. That case in full.

A rough ordering, from the pairs that share most to the pairs that share least:

1. Cebuano ↔ Hiligaynon ↔ Waray. Same subgroup. Partial mutual intelligibility, breaking down on everyday words.
2. Tagalog ↔ Bikol, Tagalog ↔ Bisayan. Same branch, different subgroups. Shared structure, different core vocabulary, no mutual intelligibility.
3. Ilocano ↔ Pangasinan. Same branch, different subgroups, no mutual intelligibility.
4. Anything ↔ Kapampangan. A branch of its own, and the furthest from everything else here.

Comprehension across any of these lines is almost always Tagalog running one way. Speakers of the other seven usually understand Tagalog because it is the language of school and national media — not because the languages are alike, and not in reverse.

Family membership says nothing about size. Tagalog is spoken at home in 39.9% of Philippine households; Ilocano in about 1.86 million of them. Several languages on this list have no separate speaker figure in the 2020 census at all, only an ethnicity count, which is why some of our language pages give regions rather than a number.

We would rather show a gap than a figure we cannot source. Speaker counts for Philippine languages circulate widely and are frequently inflated.