John JonasOwner, OnlineJobs.ph · Scale Your Business with Filipino VAs

English is an official language in the Philippines #ytshort

9 Jun 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:26

In this short monologue, the speaker explains that the Philippines has two official languages—Tagalog and English—despite a vast linguistic landscape of over 7,000 islands and more than 128 distinct languages and dialects. To address communication challenges across islands, the government designated English as an official language, especially for business, and incorporated English instruction from early elementary school, resulting in a majority of Filipinos being proficient in English. The speaker also notes that Filipino culture is heavily westernized through consumption of American and British media, which further eases communication for international outsourcing, as Filipinos are familiar with Western slang and media references.

Chapters

English is an official language of the Philippines. Yeah, there are two official languages, Tagalog and English. The Philippines has over 7,000 islands, and there are over 128 languages in the Philippines. That doesn't count, Just different dialects. So if you're from this island and you want to travel to this island and you don't speak that same language, you can't communicate with each other. It would be like being in the US and traveling from Los Angeles to New York and not being able to communicate at all. So years ago, the government recognized, well, we have this problem. And then also the future is in speaking English. So we're going to make English an official language of the Philippines. They actually called it the official language of business in the Philippines. So now they teach elementary school in English. They start teaching kids English very, very young, so that as they get older, they speak English. Now, not everybody in the Philippines speaks English, but the majority of people do. And it goes deeper than that. Communication with someone you're outsourcing with in the Philippines is super smooth and easy because they watch American TV and American movies. They watch British tv, they watch the NBA. The Philippines, English is culturally very westernized. They'll speak American slang or British slang. They'll understand it. You're very unlikely to have a communications problem with someone in the Philippines that you're outsourcing to.