False friends
Words that exist in two Philippine languages and mean different things in each. These are the ones that break a translation without making it look broken.
Last updated
In Cebuano, Hiligaynon, Waray, Bikol it means A mountain.
What does it mean in Tagalog?
Every word here is documented in the comparison guides, with what it does to translation between the two languages.
Why these matter more than ordinary mistakes
A translation that comes back garbled is easy to catch. A false friend produces output that parses cleanly, reads naturally and says something else — so nothing signals that anything went wrong. That is the failure mode worth learning to expect.
Some are merely awkward. Others are not: tabang is help in Cebuano and bland in Hiligaynon, which matters if you are shouting it. Walameans “there is none” in Tagalog and “there is” in Pangasinan — the same word, the same slot, opposite meanings.
All 47 of them, written up
Every word here comes from the comparison guides, where each pair of languages has its own list with what the collision does to machine translation between them.