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However, the fact of the matter is that no one language will allow you to converse with the entirety of the Filipino population.
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For people who didn't grow up learning English, it's very possible that you won't be able to communicate with them in the slightest. However, this doesn't take anything away from the importance of learning Tagalog. The majority of people speak English at least at a conversational level. While is one of the major foundations for one of the national languages of the Philippines, actually only around a quarter of the Filipino population speak it as a first language.
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Tagalog is a language from the Malayo-Polynesian Branch in the Austronesian language family and is spoken by more than half of the population of the Philippines which stands at around 100 million people. As Filipino and English are the national languages of the Philippines, you'll have a much easier time in your travels if you first learn Tagalog, which much of the Filipino language derives from.
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