In 2015, Steve Harvey was embroiled in a double drama: along with announcing the unsuitable winner on this 12 months’s Miss Universe competition, he mistakenly addressed our delegate as “Miss Philippians”, pushing him even further into the middle of online ridicule.
But for anyone who has ever worked in a call center and fielded calls from irate Americans, this just isn’t unusual. In fact, some people world wide who do not know about world geography assume that the Philippines is the land of the Philippians.
After all, Italians live in Italy and Australians live in Australia. So why cannot we call them Philippians or Filipinos? The Philippines as we realize it didn’t exist within the pre-colonial era.
Our ancestors didn’t yet have a way of national belonging. Instead, they were divided into different chief states, each with their very own leaders and laws.
Everything modified when the Spanish colonizers arrived. Ferdinand Magellan was the primary to put claim to the islands, which he named “San Lazaro”, before he was killed by the hands of fierce Lapu-Lapu warriors.
Years later, Miguel López de Legazpi finally managed to bring the islands under the Spanish crown, christening them Las Islas Filipinas, in honor of their king Philip II.
Since Philip is the English equivalent of Felipe, several names for this country appeared in various sources from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These include the Philipinas, Philippinas and Piliphinas.
When control of the colony transferred from Spain to the United States within the late nineteenth century, the country was officially called the Philippine Islands. Sometime within the post-war period, they finally removed the “Islands”, which then gave rise to the Philippines, whose name stays unchanged.
However, the US couldn’t provide you with a reputation for the inhabitants of its latest colony, now called the Philippine Islands. For some reason, they felt that “Filipino” or “Filipino” was inappropriate, so that they ended up adopting the Spanish-era term Filipino.
The 1973 Constitution paved the way in which for the adoption of “Filipino” because the national language. Unlike its predecessor, this language will now include foreign-sounding letters corresponding to “F”, in addition to loanwords.
The change was formally introduced within the 1987 structure. From the “abakada” alphabet, they now have an enriched version that features “foreign” letters (i.e. not a part of the unique Baybayin) corresponding to x, z, c, f, vi j, amongst others.
