James speaking Filipino, English, Spanish
This video was submitted by James Habitan from Valenzuela City, Philippines. His mother tongue, Filipino, known natively as Wikang Filipino, is a standardized form of the Tagalog language spoken by as many as 70 million people throughout the Republic of the Philippines, where it is co-official alongside English. It is also common among diaspora communities worldwide. An Austronesian language, Filipino shares common genealogy with languages throughout the Pacific and Indian Oceans, from Hawaiian in Polynesia to Malagasy in Madagascar. Since the language is one of the principal lingua francas of the Philippines, the Filipino-speaking community is extremely diverse: only 28 million, or less than half, claim the language as their mother tongue, while the rest claim the country’s other 180 languages.