Spanish language in the Philippines

[davidbleo]

I wanna know if some of you can tell me... more or less how many people speaks spanish in the Philippines and some info about the chabacano, which I think is some kind of "spanish creole"...

Any help will be apreciated

[╗]

Almost nobody in The Philippines speaks Spanish anymore. There's a minority of people who still do, but if you only speak Spanish, you're not really going to survive. lol. Today, people either speak English and/or one of the many other 170 languages (usually Tagalog). I have no idea why there are so many languages there (170??!!?! LOL!).

And yeah, Chabacano is like a creole. I heard it's like 70% or 80% Spanish.

Some examples:

Si Mario ya dormí na casa.
(‘Mario slept in the house.’)

El persona cun quien ta conversa tu, bien bueno gayot.
(The person you are talking to is very nice indeed.)

Donde tu anda?
( ‘Where are you going?’)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chavacano

[jefe]

With all the words of Spanish origin peppering the daily speech of modern day Filipinos, you would imagine that Spanish would be a major language in the Philippines. NOT. As Cristobal suggests, Spanish in the Philippines has gone the way of the dodo bird (or at least the Java Ox) -- nearly extinct.

I think 100 years ago, you might have found a minority of Hispanicized Filipinos still using Spanish on a daily basis. But with the mass education promoted by the Americans, in one generation, English became the lingua franca of the Philippines. Even decades of effort to promote Filipino / Tagalog as the national tongue has not caused English to be supplanted at all. In fact, Cebuanos might actually speak English better than Tagalog, or at least prefer to use English to avoid admitting that Tagalog beat out Cebuano as the National Language (despite having fewer speakers than Cebuano at the time of Independence).

Spanish is much more widely spoken and understood in the USA than in the Phils., even in places without a large Latino population, eg, Atlanta, even Salt Lake City.

And I have heard that Chavacano is basically a Spanish patois (can anyone confirm whether it is similar to Kristang being a Portuguese patois in Malaysia / Singapore?). Is it concentrated around the area near Zamboanga?