There are more than 100 local languages and dialects in the Philippines, with conflicting information about dialects ranging from 150 to 200. According to the Summer Institute of Linguistics, ¹ 175 languages are used in the country, including 4 languages whose native speakers were not detected.² 95% of the population of the Philippines lives on the 11 largest islands and speaks 10 main languages: Tagalog, Cebu, Ilocan, Pampangan, Pangasinan, Bicol, Panay, Sambala, Ibanaga, Magindanao (Makarenko and Pogadaev, 1999, p. 67).

Writing in the form of syllabic writing appeared on the Philippine Islands in the X-XI centuries, when Indian influence reached there through the Greater Sunda Islands. By the time the Spaniards arrived, only a few Filipino ethnic groups knew the written language, and scientists believe that virtually all of them had the same language (Llamzon, 1978, p. 4). But almost no monuments of this writing have been preserved, because, firstly, the Filipinos used very short-lived materials (bamboo tablets and palm leaves) for writing, and, secondly, the Spanish monks immediately began to translate local languages into the Latin alphabet.

The languages of the Philippine Archipelago have long attracted the attention of both local and foreign scholars because of their diversity and special grammatical structure. The first descriptions of Filipino languages were created by Spanish monks in the early 17th century.

Arriving in the Philippines, the Spaniards immediately identified Tagalog as the language of the most economically developed part of the population. It is no coincidence that the first book published in the Philippines in 1593, "Doctrina Christiana", was printed in woodcut in Spanish and Tagalog, and the Tagalog version used pre-Hispanic syllabic writing [Makarenko, 1970, p.65]. During the initial period of Spanish colonization, Filipinos continued to use their own syllabic script, and as early as 1609, Antonio de Morga wrote with admiration that "all Filipinos, with rare exceptions, whether men or women, can write in their own script" (Almario, 1997, p.7).

Spanish monks began to study local languages, primarily Tagalog. From 1593 to 1648, 81 books were published in the Philippines, most of them grammars and dictionaries of local languages. The rest of the books were religious publications, mostly also in local languages. Among them, there were 24 editions in Tagalog, 5 in Bisayan (probably in Cebuano as the main Bisayan language), 3 in Pampango, 2 in Bicol, and 1 in Ilokan (Llamzon, 1987, p. 5). In 1604, the History of the Philippine Islands (Relacion de las islas Filipinas") by the Catholic priest Pedro de Chirino, which describes the sounds of the Tagalog language, given in the form of a list. In 1610, the Art and Rules of the Tagalog Language ("Arte y reglas de la lengua tagala") by the monk Francisco de San Jose were published, and in 1613 - the"Vocabulary of the Tagalog Language" ("Vocabulario de la lengua tagala") by the monk Pedro de San Buenaventura (Almario, 1997, p. 6)..

Among the grammars of other Philippine languages, grammars of the Pampango language (1585), the Ilocan language (between 1602 and 1611), the Hiligaynon language (1637), the Warai language (1662), and the Pangasinan language (1690) were published [Llamzon, 1978, p.5].

¹ International non-profit organization that studies languages in many countries around the world.

² http://www.cthnologuc.com/show_country.asp?namc=PH

In 1703, the monk Gaspar de San Agustin established the final spelling rules for Tagalog in the Compendio de la lengua tagala, which he compared to the spelling rules of Spanish. E and i were added to the three vowels of Tagalog a, i, and o. Tagalog has a sound and the letter k, but Spanish does not have such a letter, and this sound was denoted by the letters c or qu, depending on the subsequent letters in the word. In Tagalog, the k sound began to be denoted, as in Spanish, by the letters c or cq. Spanish did not have the letter w (it occurs only in loan words), so Tagalog diphthongs like iw began to be written as io or iu.

V. Almario writes that the new script was much more effective than pre-Hispanic, and some Philippine languages (for example, Ilocan) still use it [Almario, 1997, p. 6]. Spaniards immediately noticed the uniqueness of the Philippine languages as a whole, their difference from European languages and similarity among themselves. As early as 1864 in the introduction to the dictionary of Tagalog the Jesuit Pedro de San Lucar wrote: "There are so many grammatical rules in this language that they exceed in number all the rules of all printed grammars of all living and dead European languages combined. And I read 37 grammars" [Llamzon, 1978, p. 5].

The question of the degree of proximity of the Philippine languages attracted the attention of Spanish monks. T. A. Llamson wrote that "Spanish missionaries (for example, Quirino in 1604 and Colin in 1663) immediately noticed a striking similarity between the different languages of the Philippines" (Llamson, 1979, p.80). In 1784, L. Ervas y Panduro noted that the Philippine languages belong to the same language family as the languages of Indonesia and Polynesia. In 1836, W. von Humboldt called the languages of Indonesia and Polynesia Malayo-Polynesian, and in 1899 W. Schmidt called them Austronesian (Llamzon, 1978, p.18).

Thus, the question of assigning the languages of the Philippines to the Malayo-Polynesian family of languages was resolved at the end of the XIX century. But questions remained about the relationship of the Philippine languages to other languages within the family and among themselves.

Information about the number and peculiarities of the structure of the Philippine languages accumulated gradually and was very contradictory: F. Blumentritt counted 63 languages in the book "Local races of the Philippines" ("Las razas indigenas de Filipinas") (1890) ,B. E. Retana counted 25 languages of the Philippines in his monograph" Bibliographic apparatus for the general history of the Philippines "("Bibliographic apparatus for the general history of the Philippines").Aparato bibliografica de la historia general de Filipinas") (1906), O. Beyer in 1917 listed 43 languages in his list of Philippine languages, G. Conklin in 1952 counted 75 main language groups, and, in his opinion, there are 113 subgroups in 32 [Llamzon, 1978, p. 18].

Throughout the 20th century, many Filipino and foreign linguists have been studying Filipino languages. Among them is L. Bloomfield, who published Tagalog Texts with Grammatical Analysis in 1917 and his famous work Language in 1933. Studying and describing the peculiarities of the Tagalog language, he developed methods of descriptive linguistics.

F. R. Blake wrote about the Tagalog language - "A Grammar of the Tagalog Language" ("A Grammar of the Tagalog Language", 1925). He was engaged in a comparative analysis of Tagalog with other Filipino and non-Filipino languages, and for the first time used the expression "Philippine languages" in a genetic sense (as the name of a division of the Malayo-Polynesian family). But he included all the languages of the Philippine Islands and only them in this language group (Sirk, 2008, p. 326).

V. von Humboldt, W. Schmidt, and W. McKinley were interested in Filipino languages. K. McFarland was engaged in a comparative study of Filipino languages and in 1980 published the most detailed "Atlas of Philippine Languages" (McFarland, 1980).

Among those who are already studying the language situation in the Philippines, we should mention P. M. Thompson, who in 2003 published a detailed study "Filipino, English and Taglish: switching codes from different points of view". In this work, the author is primarily concerned with the fate of the English language in the Philippines, but at the same time he provides a serious analysis of the current language situation in the country as a whole [Thompson, 2003].

Philippine linguistics has been developing since the beginning of the 20th century. Among the first Filipino linguists was L. K. Santos (1879-1963), the author of the first official grammar of the "national language", a well-known Tagalog-language writer. Since 1900, he worked as an editor of several Tagalog-language magazines, was director of the National Language Institute, governor of several provinces and senator. While engaged in political activities, he was able to convince the country's leadership that Tagalog should serve as the basis of the national language.

The founder of modern Philippine linguistics is S. Lopez (1898-1979). He studied linguistics at the University of the Philippines (UF), in Germany (University of Hamburg), Holland and France, then headed the department at UF, worked at the Institute of National Language, was a member of many Philippine and foreign scientific societies. S. Lopez studied the languages and dialects of the Philippines and Indonesia, published many scientific works, including "Textbook of the national language of Pilipino" (1974) and "Handbook for the comparative study of Austronesian Languages" (1978).

Many Filipino linguists have worked on the problems of the language situation and language policy in the Philippines, not only theoretically, but also practically, while holding responsible government positions. Among them are B. P. Sibayan, E. Gonzalez, E. Constantine, T. L. Llamson.

E. Gonzalez (1940-2006), linguist, writer, President of De La Salle University (1978-1991, 1994-1998), headed the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports of the Philippines (1998-2001), paid great attention to the study of Philippine languages and their application in the educational system, was one of the initiators of the use of local languages as languages of instruction in primary schools.

E. Constantino (born in 1930), a graduate and professor of UF, also studied at several universities in the United States. Over the years, he headed the Departments of Linguistics and the Filipino language and Filipino Literature at the University, and worked at the Institute of the National Language. All his life, E. Constantino has been studying the languages of the Philippines, including comparative ones, having compiled several dictionaries of different Philippine languages. He is one of the most ardent supporters of the idea of replacing the name of the Pilipino language with Filipino and the author of several dictionaries of this language.

The comparative study of the languages of the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia was also carried out by an Indonesian scholar who was educated in the Philippines at the University of St. Thomas, S. Ruzui. In his book "A Study of the Relationship between Indonesian, Malay and some Philippine languages" (1968), he even suggests creating a single language based on them (Ruzui, 1968, p.159). Although the idea itself seems strange, it should be recognized that with. Ruzui conducted a serious comparative study of Malay, Indonesian and the main Philippine languages and concluded that the Philippine languages show great similarities with the languages of Malaysia and Indonesia in the following ways:: 1) agglutinativity, in which affixation plays an important role; 2) common roots of words in these languages (taking into account regular phonetic alternations); 3) the same types of stress; 4) similar ways of word formation; 5) similarity of possessive and demonstrative pronouns; 6) general rules for phonetic assimilation of prefixes; 7) common affix meanings and their phonetic variants; 8) general rules for reduplication; 9) general meanings of service words and their phonetic variants; 10) similar rules for constructing sentences. After analyzing these features, S. Ruzui concluded that the languages of Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines are most closely related and have a common origin [Ruzui, 1968, p.39, 45].

Much attention was paid to the comparative study of Filipino languages by the Filipino linguist T. A. Llamson, who worked at the Ateneo de Manila University and was a member of the UNESCO Council for the Study of Malay Culture. After completing his Ph. D. in linguistics at Georgetown University, he studied Malayo-Polynesian languages at the University of Leiden. T. A. Llamson is the author of several monographs, in particular "A Subgrouping of Nine Philippine Languages" (1969), "Modern Tagalog" (1976), Standard Filipino English (1969), and A Handbook of Second Language Teaching (1970). He is also the co-author of the Makabagong balarila ng wikang Tagalog, a Grammar of the Modern Tagalog Language, published at the Ateneo University in 1974.

In 1978, T. A. Llamson published the Handbook of Philippine Language Groups (Llamson, 1978), where he described 25 groups of Philippine languages. The book consists of two parts. The first section has three sections: a historical sketch, a general description of the culture of the peoples of the Philippines and the main linguistic features of the Philippine languages. The second part includes descriptions of specific ethnic characteristics of representatives of each language group and general characteristics of their languages with data on phonology, lists of personal and demonstrative pronouns, syntactic indicators, basic verb affixes and quantitative and ordinal numerals. In addition, in each section, the author leads to

as samples, 20 sentences in the described language and a map indicating the places of residence of native speakers of this language.

T. A. Llamson explains his choice of these 25 languages for two reasons: the availability of data on these languages and the fact that he considers these languages and their native speakers to be representatives of different types of languages and cultures of the archipelago (Llamson, 1978, p. I).

The historical essay tells not only about the history of the Philippines, but also gives a brief description of the development of the language situation in the country from pre-Hispanic times to the second half of the 1970s. The essay "Cultural characteristics of Philippine language groups" presents the structure of Philippine society in different historical periods, the religion and economy of the Christian part of the population, animists and Muslims.

Of particular interest to me is the third essay, "The main linguistic features of the Philippine Languages", which gives a brief history of the creation of the national language, the history of comparative study of the Philippine languages, and highlights their common features. The latter topic was described in more detail by T. A. Llamzon in the article" Languages of the Philippines"in the collection on Southeast Asian Languages (Llamzon, 1979, pp. 77-156). This essay and article differ from many other works on the languages of the Philippines in that they represent one of the first attempts to evaluate all the material accumulated at that time, in order to distinguish groups of Philippine languages not by geographical, but by linguistic principle, and in order to evaluate attempts to reconstruct proto-languages. However, T. A. Llamson does not offer his own classification of the Philippine languages.

Referring to the history of comparative studies of Filipino languages, T. A. Llamson points out that in this area, researchers are working to determine the place of various Filipino languages among all the languages of the Philippines and the links between individual languages within groups of Filipino languages.

Among those who work in the first direction, he mentions D. Chretien, who in 1951, based on a review of 1903 morphemes of 21 Philippine languages, identified three groups of Philippine languages: Luzon, macro-Bisayan and Mindanao-Sulu. The latter group is related to Macro-Bisayan through the Tausug language, while Macro-Bisayan is related to Luzon through the Bicol languages (Llamzon, 1978, p.22).

G. S. Conklin, who geographically divided the languages of the Philippines into Luzon, Bisai, and Mindanao, and then identified only two groups: northern and central (Llamzon, 1978, p.22-23), worked in the same direction.

In 1962, D. Thomas and A. Healy studied 37 Philippine languages using the M list. The authors of the study used a set of methods to determine the time of divergence of the Philippine languages and concluded that the Philippine languages separated from the Malay languages around 1300 BC, then about 1100 BC the Philippine languages split into Iwatan (on the northernmost Philippine islands), Ilongot (about which other authors, such as McFarland , 1980, p. 75], write that it differs significantly from all neighboring languages), languages of the Dumagat group (languages of the east coast of Luzon Island) and the Philippine languages themselves, which, according to the authors of the study, were divided into three groups in 700 years BC: the North Philippine family, the Pangasinan language and the South Philippine family. In their opinion, the Northern Philippine family split about 200 years BC, and the southern Philippine family split about 100 years BC (Llamzon, 1978, p. 23).

Subsequently, various scholars made several attempts to establish kinship between the languages of the Philippines based on the M-list. Svodesha. Among them are R. B. Fox, W. E. Sibley, and F. Yeggan, who studied 17 languages of northern and central Luzon, and D. Zork, who, while studying the languages of the Bisai Archipelago, divided them into five subgroups: southern, Cebuanese, central, Bantonese, and western (Llamzon, 1978, p.24-25). In addition, R. Elkins in 1974 published a study of the Manobo group of languages (central and southern Mindanao), dividing them into 19 languages and dialects. Other linguists have studied smaller groups of Bikol languages, Igorot languages, etc. Among them, we should mention the great work of D. Zork, who, taking into account the data of previous researchers, in 1975 attempted to establish genetic connections within the South Philippine group of languages, dividing them into five subgroups [Llamzon, 1978, p. 26].

Having considered all the accumulated material, T. A. Llamzon describes the structural characteristics of the Philippine languages, emphasizing their similarity and trying to restore the features of the proto-Austronesian language (Llamzon, 1978, pp. 27-31). The same topic, as already mentioned, is devoted to

His more detailed paper," Languages of the Philippines " (Llamzon, 1979, p. 77-156), will therefore provide a general overview of the two papers.

T. A. Llamson conducted a comparative analysis of some common phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexical features of the languages of the Philippines and came to the following conclusions:

1) The Philippine languages contain from three to eight vowels and can be divided into eight types depending on the number of vowels and where they are formed. Most languages belong to the type with six vowels (26 languages). Four vowels are found in 25 languages, five in 21 languages, and three in 16 languages. It is believed, he notes, that Proto-Austronesian had four vowels a, i, i, and e, and that some languages with three vowels lost e in some dialects but retained it in others. Those languages that have five vowels, as a rule, received them by dividing the phoneme i into i and e and the phoneme i into i and o under the influence of borrowed words from the Spanish language. In languages with six vowels, in addition to this division, there was another one between the anterior-lingual and posterior-lingual vowels.

2) There are between 14 and 21 consonants in the Philippine languages. According to the number of consonants, all languages can be divided into seven types. The most common type (41 languages, more than 80% of Filipinos speak these languages) contains 16 consonants. All Philippine languages have the following consonants: explosive p, t, k, q, b, d, g, nasal m, n, ng, semivowel w, y.

3) Syllable structure in all Philippine languages is characterized by the presence of at least one vowel with an optional consonant before or after it. Loan words may contain clusters of consonants, such as trabaho 'work' (Spanish), but when morphological changes occur, they are often destroyed, for example, nagtatrabaho 'works'.

4) All Philippine languages have the following diphthongs: aw, ay, yy. Some also have iw, ew, oy, ey,

5) In most Filipino languages, longitude, pitch, and pitch together determine the stressed syllable.

6) Numerals in Philippine languages are based on the decimal system. All languages have separate words for each of the first ten numbers, then the word "ten" is combined with each of the first ten numbers. Numerals denoting tens are also constructed in the same way. Special lexical units are used for the numerals "one hundred" and"one thousand".

7) The personal pronoun paradigm in Filipino languages consists of forms that reflect the person (1st, 2nd, and 3rd), number (singular and plural), and case (nominative, possessive, and locative). In the first person plural, there are different forms with and without the addressee. Only a few languages have dual forms. The possessive enclitics ki 'my', ti 'your', ta 'our', pa 'his/ her', da 'their'are extremely common in the Philippine languages.

8) Many Filipino languages have the following forms of demonstrative pronouns: a) close to the speaker and far from the listener; b) close to the listener but far from the speaker; c) far from the listener and the speaker. In addition, some Bisayan and Central Philippine languages have special forms with the meaning "next to the speaker and listener".

9) The verb system of Filipino languages reflects more typical Austronesian grammatical categories of aspect and to a lesser extent of tense. Four types of focus can draw the recipient's attention to the actor, goal, location, and tool. The role of focus is indicated by the verb form and syntactic particle.

10) Syntactic indicators in Philippine languages are divided into two systems: for personal names and for all other nouns. In both cases, the paradigm has three cases: nominative, possessive, and locative. The Central-Philippine and Southern-Philippine languages use the special service word manga to denote the plural of non-personal names. Syntactic indicators indicate grammatical relationships between nouns in a sentence. The focus is often the goal, location, or tool, rather than the doer [Llamson, 1978, p.27-31;Llamson, 1979, p. 99-118].

Thus, having collected a large amount of material on the history of studying the languages of the Philippines and considered attempts at their genetic classification, T. A. Llamson did not offer his own version of their classification, highlighting only their common features. Therefore, the Linguistic Atlas of the Philippines

To. McFarland (1980), published in 1980, was an important next step in describing the genetic relationships between Filipino languages.

To. McFarland reviews 75 Philippine languages and dialects in his Atlas. The atlas includes data from the 1970 and 1975 Philippine Censuses, a description of the groups into which the Philippine languages are divided, maps of the distribution of different Philippine languages (by region and individual languages), and in the appendix the article "How different the Philippine languages are".

He begins the description by stating the questions he is looking for answers to: 1) how many and what languages are used by Filipinos; 2) where do those who speak these languages live; 3) how many people speak each of the languages; 4) what are the relationships between different Filipino languages? [McFarland, 1980, p. 1]. To answer the first of these questions, the author examines the differences between a language and a dialect using the example of different variants of Tagalog: territorial dialects (the dialect of the island of Marinduque), dispersive dialects (meaning the same language in different regions of the same country, when speakers of the dialect have no connection native region of native speakers of the given language), social dialects (McFarland, 1980, p. 3).

Describing the causes of the emergence of dialects, K. McFarland introduces the term "language complex", meaning a group of closely related languages or very different dialects of one language (McFarland, 1980, p. 5). Thus, he avoids the problem of distinguishing between languages and dialects, although this does not make his work any less relevant for describing the languages of the Philippines.

Considering possible sources of information to answer his second and third questions, McFarland notes that census data cannot be considered as complete and final, since when using them, it is necessary to take into account social factors (remoteness of settlements, low literacy of native speakers, confusion of ethnic and linguistic concepts, insufficient knowledge of those who conduct the survey,lack of knowledge of the population). etc.) [McFarland, 1980, p. 8-9]. K. McFarland considers scientific works devoted to the description of the languages of the Philippines to be a more reliable source, and indicates which of them he relied on.

Answering the fourth question, McFarland first provides the conclusions that all scholars who study the languages of the Philippines agree with: 1) all Filipino languages, except for Chavacano and imported Chinese, English, Spanish, etc., belong to the Austronesian family of languages, namely its western (Hesperonesian) branch; 2) there are three large groups of languages in the Philippines: North-Philippine, Mesophilippine, and South-Philippine; 3) it is possible that Mesophilippine and South-Philippine languages are united in the same group. one group; 4) Iwatan, Southern Mindanao, Sama, and Sangil languages do not belong to any of the three groups; 5) relationships between Northern Philippine languages and the groups / subgroups listed in paragraph. 3 and 4, and their connections with other Austronesian languages cannot yet be clearly described; 6) within the northern group, a subgroup of Cordillera languages is distinguished, including Dumagat languages, Northern Cordillera languages, Ilocan, Central Cordillera languages, and Southern Cordillera languages; 7) in the Mesophilippine group, a Central Philippine subgroup is distinguished, including Tagalog, Bicol, Bisayan, and Eastern Mindanao languages; 8) within the Central Philippine subgroup, Western Bisayan and Central Bisayan languages are combined into the northern Bisayan subgroup (McFarland, 1980, p. 11).

This division of the Philippine languages, according to McFarland, leaves a number of problems unresolved: the assignment of the Ilongot and Sambal languages to the Northern Philippine group, the uncertain position of the Mangyan languages, and the assignment of the southern Bisayan languages to the Bisayan languages [McFarland, 1980, p.11].

According to McFarland, four languages play a special role in the Philippines: Cebu, Tagalog, Ilocan and Hiligaynon. The scientist distinguishes them by the number of native speakers and their functions, pointing out that they are often used as regional languages of interethnic communication and have a long literary tradition. In addition, a significant number of native speakers of these languages migrated to other parts of the country, thereby expanding the scope of their use [McFarland, 1980, p. 17].

Here it should be noted that T. A. Llamzon mentioned only three local languages functioning as lingua franca: Ilokanese in the north of the country, Cebuano in the south, and Pilipino (Tagalog) in other regions, without mentioning Hiligaynon (Llamzon, 1979, p. 85). I think that K. McFarland's opinion is more reasonable, since hiligaynon is lingua franca in many countries.

Although it is a dispersive language, it is somewhat more difficult to identify specific regions where it functions in this capacity than regions with other lingua franca.

To. McFarland lists all the languages of the Philippines known at that time, indicating their relation to groups and subgroups of Philippine languages, and with maps of the places where they are used, presents a genealogical classification of the languages of the Philippines. This, as mentioned above, is a qualitatively new step in the study of Filipino languages. However, it should be noted that the author limits his research to the geographical boundaries of the Philippine Islands.

When specifying the role of individual languages in different regions, the author uses a certain scale, highlights the dominant languages (they are spoken by more than 90% of the population), the main languages (they are spoken by 50-90% of the population).% large languages (10-49% of the population) and small languages (less than 10% of the population) [McFarland, 1980, p.58]. This information is particularly valuable for describing the language situation.

Thus, K. McFarland divides all Philippine languages into seven groups:

I. Ivatan languages.

II. Northern Philippine languages.

A. Languages of the Cordillera:

1. dumagat,

2. Northern Cordillera,

3. Ilocan,

4. Central Cordillera,

5. Southern Cordillera.

B. Ilongot.

C. Sambala languages:

1. sambal,

2. pampango,

3. sinauna.

III. Mesophilippian languages.

A. Northern Mangyan mountains.

B. South Mangyan languages.

C. Palawan Islands.

D. Central Philippine languages:

1. tagalog,

2. Bikolskie,

3. severnobisayskie islands,

4. South China Islands,

5. Eastern Mindanao.

IV. South Philippine languages.

A. Subanon,

B. Danao,

C. Manobo.

V. Languages themselves.

VI. Languages of Southern Mindanao.

VII. The Sangil language [McFarland, 1980, p. 60-62].

In conclusion, K. McFarland provides comparative transcription tables of 20 words in different Philippine languages, as well as two sentences in them, which, in the author's opinion, can serve as material for analyzing the degree of difference between the Philippine languages from each other.

In general, the "Linguistic Atlas of the Philippines" by C. McFarland, although it leaves many unresolved questions, provides a huge amount of material for various linguistic studies in the field of comparative historical linguistics and sociolinguistics.

Since the problems associated with the language situation and language policy in the Philippines are still very relevant, modern Filipino linguists also pay enough attention to them and conduct a comparative analysis of the Philippine languages in order to justify the idea of creating a single Philippine language based on different languages of the Philippines. Among them are Pamela Constantino, Vinu Paz, Nilo S. Ocampo, Howie M. Peregrino, Isagani Cruz, Wilma Resuma, and others. Many of them teach at the University of the Philippines or other higher education institutions in the country.

For example, P. Constantino, engaged in a comparative study of the vocabulary of Filipino languages, comes to the conclusion that almost half of the vocabulary of all languages of the Philippines consists of similar, if not identical words [Constantino, 2002, p. 51], which can be clearly presented in the table:

One of the leading sociolinguistics experts in the Philippines is Bonifacio Sibayan.

The Philippines, literature and languages of this country in the USSR began to be systematically studied in 1960. Among the first Soviet Filipinists who studied Tagalog and Filipino literature were G. E. Rachkov, I. V. Podberezsky, V. A. Makarenko, and L. I. Shkarban.

Edited by V. A. Makarenko, the first "Tagalog-Russian Dictionary" (1959) and "Russian-Tagalog Dictionary" (1965) were published. For many years, V. A. Makarenko taught Tagalog at the ISAA of Moscow State University, and in 1970 published the monograph "Tagalog Word Formation". Using an experimental list of 215 units, we compared the basic vocabulary of Tagalog, Bisai (Cebuano-Ilongo dialect), Ilokan, and Pangasinan with the vocabulary of Indonesian, and came to interesting conclusions: each of the named Philippine languages shows a greater affinity with Tagalog than with any of the analyzed languages, and each of them is closer to each other. more Tagalog than Indonesian. The greatest degree of affinity was found between Tagalog and Bisayan, the smallest between Pangasinan and Indonesian. Ilokan is the closest language to Indonesian, and the degree of kinship between Tagalog and Indonesian is very similar.

significantly less than the difference between Tagalog and any of the Philippine languages used for analysis (Makarenko, 1970, p. 161).

I. V. Podberezsky, author of the first " Textbook of the Tagalog language "(1976), taught Tagalog at MGIMO of the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs, published a number of articles on Tagalog, as well as several books on literature, culture and languages of the Philippines. I. V. Podberezsky and V. L. Makarenko were actively engaged in translating works of Philippine literature.

L. I. Shkarban devoted her scientific activity to the study of Tagalog grammar, published many articles on this topic, and in 1995 her extremely interesting and profound monograph "The Grammatical structure of the Tagalog Language"was published.

G. E. Rachkov studied Tagalog grammar, taught Tagalog at Leningrad State University, published a number of scientific articles and a monograph " Introduction to the morphology of the modern Tagalog Language "(1981).

Among the recent works devoted to the comparative study of Austronesian languages, I would like to highlight the monograph "Austronesian Languages: An Introduction to Comparative History" by J. H. Sirk (2008), which contains a huge amount of material on a variety of Austronesian languages, including the Philippine languages, and provides an in-depth analysis of their phonetics, vocabulary, and grammatical structure.

Traditionally, Filipino languages belong to the western" sub-branch " of the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family [LES, 1990, p. 543], but, according to Y. H. Sirk, they can be attributed to the Philippine group of the Austronesian language family, the largest in terms of the number of languages included in it [Sirk, 2008, p.325-328]. When determining the number of languages included in this family, Y. H. Sirk, like other researchers, faced the problem of distinguishing between language and dialect and chose mutual understanding as a criterion for distinguishing them, although he stipulated that this criterion is very lax [Sirk, 2008, p.20]. He considered in detail such concepts as dialect chains and dialect networks, simplex languages and complex languages [Sirk, 2008, p. 21-22], i.e. those concepts that are extremely relevant for describing Philippine languages.

Referring to the research of R. Blast, Y. H. Sirk counted approximately 825 languages in the Austronesian family (Sirk, 2008, p. 23). He examined the range of the Austronesian family in detail and described the languages of the Philippines in sufficient detail, while relying on the works of the Filipino linguist D. Zork, who is often referred to by K. McFarland, and on the "Atlas" of McFarland himself [Sirk, 2008, p. 33]. Yu. H. Sirk cited data that the number of speakers of Austronesian languages is very high. At present, the number of foreign languages is probably slightly more than 300 million people [Sirk, 2008, p.46].

Y. H. Sirk noted that "linguistic diversity in the north (on Luzon Island north of the Tagalog language area) and in the south (mainly in the southern part of Mindanao Island) is more pronounced than in the central part of the archipelago" [Sirk, 2008, p.32].

Further, the author considered the most important in social terms Austronesian languages, including Tagalog. He called it the official language of the Philippines, although with the caveat that it is often called Pilipino as the official language [Sirk, 2008, p. 45]. Here it is necessary to correct Y. H. Sirk, since since 1987 the official language of the Philippines is called Filipino and, in addition, this idiom is already significantly different from Tagalog, which, of course, served as its basis, but this inaccuracy does not detract from the value of the entire work.

J. H. Sirk covered in detail many issues related to the Austronesian languages, for example, socially determined variants of the Austronesian languages, their origin and history of their research, issues of reconstruction of the Early Austronesian language, etc. But since he did not address specific issues related to the Philippine languages, I will not list them.

In chapter 4, "Basic features of the Austronesian language system," Yu.H. Sirk described the Philippine grammatical type in detail, noting that this type is common to almost all languages of the Philippines (with the possible exception of some languages of Southern Mindanao), and is also represented in most languages of Taiwan, in some languages of North Sulawesi. The languages of northern Borneo are similar to this type. J. H. Sirk wrote that " the Filipino type is of particular interest to us because, firstly, its distribution area includes most of the island of Taiwan and, secondly, it is observed in several direct divisions of the family (in parts of Malay-

of the Polynesian group and in a number of Taiwanese languages belonging to different groups of the same rank)" [Sirk, 2008, pp. 280-281].

Thus, we can see that the author completely departed from the geographical principle of distinguishing Philippine languages and relied only on linguistic features.

Among the most characteristic features of the Philippine grammar type that distinguish Philippine languages from other related languages, Y. H. Sirk identified the following::

1) Most verbs have several special forms, which are called pledges. Usually, most verbs do not have all the morphologically possible voice forms, most often there are four of them, less often three.

2) Intransitive verbs are usually formed in the same way as transitive verbs in the active voice. The difference between intransitive and transitive verbs is their valence. Intransitive verbs cannot be used in the passive.

3) An active pledge is contrasted with a direct object pledge, a place pledge, and a tool pledge.

4) "Active voice" does not correspond to its name: as a rule, it is in the active voice that the lowest intensity of action or greater inactivity is expressed.

5) In a sentence whose predicate is an inactive verb, the actor (if it is not omitted) expressed in the same way as possessor.

6) Functioning of inactive collateral is very difficult.

In the case of the pledge of a direct object, the most common subject is a word that names the object to which the action is directed, covers it entirely and leads to the fact that the essence of the object or being that represents this direct object undergoes some cardinal change.

The place pledge often expresses the meaning of the place where the action takes place. The second important semantic center of this voice is the meaning "to whom"," for whom", i.e. the dative meaning.

Often, when pledging an instrument, the subject is the name of the beneficiary of the action - the one who (less often - what) benefits from the action. But the most frequent function of the voice of an instrument is to indicate such an action, an object or creature, which does not change the essence of the latter, but makes it move.

7) The role of word order is particularly important in languages where nouns that serve as predicate arguments receive almost no syntactic indicators, and where existing syntactic indicators do not distinguish between the most important arguments, in particular the actor and certain objects of action.

8) In some Philippine languages, there are verb forms that do not take within the given subordinate clause or independent subject clause, so-called non-focus verbs.

9) The absence of personal, or so-called "conjugated" verb forms [Sirk, 2008, pp. 281-290].

10) The presence of free possessive pronouns that can be used in the predicate function. In some languages, such a pronoun, usually combined with an article or determinant, can serve as an argument for the predicate. In some Philippine languages, free possessive pronouns can be used both together with a noun, expressing the meaning of possessor, and with the so-called inactive verb forms, indicating the actor [Sirk, 2008, pp. 294-297].

11) Nouns of most Philippine-type languages fall into two categories: (a) personal names and (b) other nouns (mostly common nouns). In some languages, a slightly different division is found - into nouns denoting animate and inanimate objects [Sirk, 2008, pp. 309-310].

12) The sentence has a neutral word order VOS or VSO. The verb can be preceded by negation and some other particles, as well as sirconstants that relate to the entire sentence [Sirk, 2008, p. 323].

Comparing the Philippine-type languages with other languages of this family, Y. H. Sirk concluded that the Malayo-Polynesian proto-language either originated in the Philippines or was introduced to this archipelago from Vietnam. In addition, he claimed that in the north-eastern part of Borneo, languages that are grammatical in structure belong to the Philippine type or are very close to it. At present, according to the author, most of Borneo has a large number of races.-

We have studied languages whose structure can be considered as a certain simplification of the Philippine type [Sirk, 2008, pp. 324-325].

The current state of the Filipino language is covered in the monograph by Yu. I. Studenichnik "Code switching: Tagalog vs. English. Interaction of English and Tagalog in the context of Bilingualism in the Philippines", published in 2011. The author examines in detail the Tagalog-English code switching in the speech of Filipinos, and also gives a brief description of the language situation in the country [Studenichnik, 2011].

Thus, the article deals in the most general terms with the history of the study of Philippine languages and the linguistic situation in the Philippines from the 16th century to the present, from the geographical to the linguistic principle of distinguishing and describing these languages and their connections with each other and with other languages of this huge language family.

list of literature

Linguistic Encyclopedia (LES), Moscow: Sovetskaya entsiklopediya, 1990.

Makarenko V. A. Razvitie sovremennoy yazykovoy situatsii v Filippinskoi Respublike i se osnovnye tendentsii [Development of the modern language situation in the Philippine Republic and the Council of Europe main trends].

Makarenko V. A., Pogadasv V. A. Yazykovaya situatsiya i yazykovaya politika v Yugo-Vostochnoy Azii: sravnitel'noe issledovanie [Language situation and language policy in Southeast Asia: a comparative study]. Episode 13. Oriental studies. № 2, 1999.

Sirk Yu. K. Austronesian Languages: Introduction to Comparative historical Study, Moscow: Vostochnaya literatura, 2008.

Studenichnik Yu. I. Switching codes: Tagalog vs. English. Interaction of English and Tagalog languages in the context of bilingualism in the Philippines, Moscow: Kniga po razvitiem, 2011.

Shkarban L. I. Philippines (Republic of the Philippines) / / Foreign East. Language situation and language policy. Guide. Moscow, 1986.

Almario V.S. Tradisyon at Wikang Filipino. Scntro ng Wikang Filipino, UP Diliman, Lungsod Quezon, 1997.

Constantino E. The Sentence Patterns of Twenty-Six Philippine Languages // Lingua. Issue 15, 1965.

Llamson T.A. Handbook of Philippine Language Groups. Quezon City, 1978.

Llamson T.A. Languages of the Philippines // Papers on Southeast Asian Languages / An Introduction to the Languages of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. Anthology Scries 5. SEAMEO Regional Language Centre, 1979.

McFarland C.D. A Linguistic Atlas of the Philippines. Tokyo, 1980.

Ruzui S. A Survey of Relations between Indonesian, Malay and Some Philippine Languages / Dcwan Bahasa Dan Pustaka; Kemcntcrian Pelajaran Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur, 1968.

Thompson R.M. Filipino, English and Taglish: Language Switching from Multiple Perspectives. Philadelphia, USA: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 2003.

http://www.cthnologuc.com/show_country_asp?namc=ph

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