Filipino Tagalog Speech Sounds: Determining Difference from Disorder

Here’s a sneak peek of one of the things we are working on:: The second edition of Difference or Disorder:  Understanding Speech and Language Development in Students from Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Backgrounds.  One of the new chapters is Filipino Tagalog Speech Sounds and Language Structures.

Filipino Facts

• Number of speakers: More than 90 million speakers worldwide
• Writing system: Latin (Filipino alphabet)
• Language Family: Austronesian
• Official language in: the Philippines

Are Filipino and Tagalog the same language?

Filipino has been the national language of the Phillipines since 1937 (Malabonga & Marinova-Todd, 2007)  and it is the standard register of the Tagalog language. What exactly does that mean? One author described Filipino as “Tagalog-Plus.” Filipino is Tagalog with the addition of contributions from many other languages. Most people do not strictly differentiate between the terms Filipino and Tagalog.

Let’s take a look at the Filipino / Tagalog speech sounds as compared to English.

Filipino Tagalog Phonology and Phonotactics

If you want to spend some of your CEU time honing your skills with English Language Learners, take a look at our Difference or Disorder Essentials Pack that includes a copy of Difference or Disorder? and our two top courses.

More Languages!

Thanks to the great feedback we have gotten from those using the Difference or Disorder book, we’ve set out to make a second edition that will include Filipino/Tagalog, Cambodian, Urdu/Hindi, Ibo, Amharic, Portuguese, Turkish, Hmong, Albanian, Thai, Kinyarwanda (ever heard of that one?), and Romanian.  If there are other languages you would like to see, please let us know.  For those not familiar with our current book, we’ve already compared and contrasted English with Spanish, Vietnamese (see post about it), Hebrew, Korean, German, Czech, Japanese, Farsi, Mandarin, French, Russian, Arabic, and the African-American English dialect.

Case Studies:  Difference or Disorder?

We are also assembling a series of case studies to accompany the book that will provide great training opportunities for experienced SLPs, as well as graduate students and those who are newer to the field.  We have many university professors lined up to try these out in their classes.  Here’s a look at a portion of the chapter on Filipino/Tagalog.

If you are looking for speech therapy in Austin, Texas for a child who speaks Filipino / Tagalog, contact our Austin speech therapy clinic.