Talk:Filipino people

Arabic language

I can't understand why users here insist to include Arabic language!! it's not an official for them nor do speak Arabic!. Indeed some of them trying to learn for quranic and islamic studies but that does not mean Filipino people speak it. many countries like Pakistan and India learn Arabic for the studies, is it included an official for them? could we open an open discussion here please? --George the writer (talk) 18:01, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

It's obvious and very clear that Filipino do not speak eachother in arabic. I have discussed user Obsidian Soul about it at the top of the page.--George the writer (talk) 08:20, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

Apparently Filipinos in Saudi Arabia do speak Arabic, my cousin's uncle speaks it since he works there as an OFW. But I believe that's confined to the OFW page. PacificWarrior101 (talk) 10:11, 9 January 2014 (UTC)PacificWarrior101

Yes! they do speak. But each other they don't. They speak few Arabic with Saudi, you will see Filipino in Saudi speak in their own language not arabic. Arabic is not an official language in Philippines.--George the writer (talk) 10:54, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Arabic is mentioned exactly once in the article: "The constitution also provides that Spanish and Arabic shall be promoted on a voluntary and optional basis.", citing the current Philippine constitution as a supporting source. In Article XIV, Sections 7 and 8, the constitution says, "Spanish and Arabic shall be promoted on a voluntary and optional basis." and "This Constitution shall be promulgated in Filipino and English and shall be translated into major regional languages, Arabic, and Spanish." I don't see reason why that information ought to be suppressed in this article.

On the other hand, this article is on the topic of Filipino peoople, and legalities growing out of the country's constitution don't necessarily bear strongly on that topic. if it is true that Arabic and/or Spanish are only spoken by small, culturally isolated parts of the Filipino populace, perhaps that ought to be mentioned. In order to be mentioned, however, that would need to be supportable by verifiable reliable sources. Original research such as the discussion above is not in itself sufficient to support article content.

Some content of other articles (e.g., Arab settlement in the Philippines and Languages of the Philippines) may contain information relevant to this discussion. In any case, care should be taken in editing this article not to introduce contradictions with other articles.

Also, McKenna, Thomas M.; Abdula, Esmael A. (2009), "6. Islamic Education in the Philippines", in Robert W. Hefner (ed.), Making Modern Muslims: The Politics of Islamic Education in Southeast Asia, University of Hawaii Press, pp. 205–235, ISBN 978-0-8248-3280-3 might be of interest. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 00:01, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

definition

There's something strange with how this article works... if I take the population number given here, there is no room for there to be Tagalog people, Moro people, Visayan people, etc. in the Philippines!

I think what's probably going on here is that the article's stats comes from the NSO Philippine census does not actually classify for ethnicity? In any case, it seems to me the Filipinos are not not nearly as unified a group as the article would lead one to believe, since AFAICT that encompass all Austronesian ethnolinguistic groups native to the Philippines, several of which are considered distinct from each others elsewhere in the encyclopedia. I think it is especially telling in that regard that Austronesian peoples separate the people of the Philippines in several groups.

Clearly the definition is not useless: it separate a set of peoples united by common traits that consider themselves related—by opposition to the Melanesian groups (e.g. the Aeta people) and various people of more recent descent. It doesn't help, of course, that "Filipino" is also in practice the general term for the citizenship in addition to ethnic group, as demonstrated by Chinese Filipino. I guess what I'm aiming for is that the idea of the "Filipino as an ethnic group" seems to be a relatively recent construct (in a country that is otherwise clearly not a nation state).

Maybe the article could be renamed to Filipino peoples and the introduction reworked to reflect the situation more closely? Circéus (talk) 01:32, 17 November 2013 (UTC)

"Not a nation state"? How so? An ethnic group is not restricted to the smallest linguistic grouping or by genetic ancestry. Though Filipinos are indeed composed of several smaller ethnolinguistic groups, most are part of the Philippine branch of the Austronesian language family indigenous to the islands. This includes the Negrito groups in the Philippines, whose languages and culture are still Austronesian despite differences in genetic ancestry, and the Moros of southwestern Mindanao who though Muslim, are still closely related culturally and linguistically to the Visayans and the Lumad ethnic groups.

The Philippines is multiethnic, yes, but it is also strongly homogenous in terms of culture. Virtually all traces of the previous cultural distinctions from smaller chiefdoms, etc. were erased during the Spanish colonial rule. It was further diluted by large scale inter-island migrations in the 20th century, leading to the cultural assimilation of most of the remaining non-Hispanized Indigenous peoples of the Philippines. A Visayan and a Tagalog might speak different languages, but everything else is virtually the same. Which is why Filipinos used to think the different languages were merely "dialects". Don't base apparent cultural unity by linguistic classification.

I strongly oppose moving this to "Filipino peoples", for that reason. The distinctions are simply not strong enough to merit that. In contrast to, say, Malaysians, who strongly distinguish between Ethnic Malays and their smaller ethnic groupings. "Filipino" is basically a cultural identity, rather than simply citizenship or an ancestral grouping. It is recent, yes, as the term "Filipino" itelf was used exclusively for full-blooded Spaniards born in the islands prior to Philippine independence from Spain. But that doesn't preclude ethnogenesis. What matters is its current usage, and it is indeed used in the sense of an ethnic group.

Most importantly, just because X people is made up of Y people and Z people, doesn't automatically mean that you have to call it X peoples, cf. American people.

As for population numbers, that's either numbers from different censuses taken at different times, or people with ancestry from multiple groups identifying for several (e.g. a half-Tagalog, half-Ilocano who identifies as both). The Philippine census does not classify for ancestry in the sense that it does not ask you if you have Chinese or Spanish ancestors. But it does ask for your native language which can be used to quantify the approximate number of people belonging to the largest ethnic groups.

That said, I have removed the "Austronesian" part of the original heading, as you do have a point regarding Filipinos who are not of Austronesian ancestry. I have also removed the paragraphs on etymology and orthography to its own section. As well as removed the infamous 3.6% study as it is WP:UNDUE there and per the previous discussion above. The lead still requires a lot of work for it to be a summary of the contents. Its application to citizenship and nationality needs to be discussed in the lead section as well, but it should not be restricted to them per usage.-- OBSIDIAN†SOUL 12:02, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

Revert adding sports figures to the infobox photo

in this revert I was intending to remove just Tim Tebow, as my understanding is that he is not Filipino. I inadvertantly removed several others who are Filipino as well, though. I'll leave it to other editors to restore those photos if that is appropriate. It seems to me as if the addition ought to have gotten consensus here before being done. I haven't followed it, but hasn't there been quite a bit of "churn" in the infobox photos here? Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 08:11, 22 March 2014 (UTC)

What's this Mestizo bias in the infobox?

So it's come to my attention that somebody keeps reverting my edits, and replacing them with every single random Mestizo Filipino they can find. Listen, there are like already four Mestizos in this infobox, and perhaps Sultan Kudarat's legitimacy comes to the fact that he was proclaimed a Philippine national hero by Ferdinand Marcos, probably the ONLY one as a native of Mindanao.

You might as well rename this article "Catholic Mestizos of Southeast Asia" if you are going to fill the infobox with 7/10 Mestizo Catholics. PacificWarrior101 (talk) 05:00, 18 April 2014 (UTC)PacificWarrior101

Here we go again, same idiot reverting my changes in a pathetic attempt to make Filipinos look Hispanic. PacificWarrior101 (talk) 02:49, 4 May 2014 (UTC)PacificWarrior101

I Have Made Changes to the Images/Mosaic Discussion Section

As you people have known, a huge edit war took place between I and some IP user from Britain, faking to be an embassy worker and a worker for the King of Spain. So here is a section, for discussions regarding the people on the mosaic and infobox simply to prevent another huge edit war from taking place.

So, I have added Sultan Kudarat in favor of José María of Manila, since is he the only Philippine national hero from the Moro region. Additionally I have also added Said Basher albeit he is a national Islamic imam, in to accompany the existing Roman Catholic priests (Pedro Calungsod and Francisca del Espíritu Santo Fuentes). This equalizes it, two Roman Catholics and two Muslims.

Also, I have put Jesús A. Villamor since he was a prominent Filipino fighter during World War II.

Any opposing opinions, objections should be discussed on this section. PacificWarrior101 (talk) 16:56, 19 May 2014 (UTC)PacificWarrior101

Regions with significant populations (2014-9 revision)

Seeing a problem with some of the figures in this list, I WP:BOLDly revised the whole list. For those who want to check out my changes, generally what I did was this:

1. I located the latest "Stock Estimate of Overseas Filipinos" here. It was the 2012 estimate here
2. I tried to verify each figure in the list using the source cited for it
3. If I was able to verify the figure, I compared it with the Stock Estimate figure and made a judgement about which figure to use
4. If I was not able to verify the figure in the list, I used the stock estimate figure
5. I then manually sorted the list into order by the population figure
6. I then compared the sorted list with figures in the 2012 stock estimate, adding entries from the stock estimate into the list (I added Singapore, Brunei, Macau, Jordan, Algeria, Angola, Equatorial Guinea, perhaps others, using "xx" for the inserted number of the item)
7. I then renumbered the list items sequentially, removing items numbered higher than 35 from the list (the template currently displays only 32 entries)

There are some obvious problems with this

• Using the stock guide figure counts only POEA Filipinos in a country. This is probably close to correct for most countries, and wildly incorrect for some countries.
• Figures from some other sources are problematic. For example, the Australia figure is for persons in Australia who were born in the Philippines. This miscounts non-filipinos born in the Philippines who happen to reside in Australia as Filipinos, and miscounts Filipinos born in Australia as non-filipinos.

But then, we're looking for reasonable estimates with source support, not exact headcount figures. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 21:36, 23 July 2014 (UTC)