24 Nov 2025 · 5 min
John Jonas explores how English became dominant in the Philippines despite 120+ local languages, taught from preschool onward and used in government and business. He talks to Filipino remote workers and suggests hiring managers look for English slang as a sign of real fluency.
Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at hiring ofs online Filipino specialists. This is episode 80. How do Filipinos learn English? I don't know if you know this, but in the Philippines, there are two official languages, like, mandated by the government. One of them is Filipino and one of them is English. I didn't realize this until really I was there in 2010, which is the only time I've been there. So you don't have to go to the Philippines to make this work. My first day, I was in the hotel lobby. So we're going to this island, Boracay, where we spent, me and my wife and my three kids at the time spend five weeks on a beach, Boracay. And before that, we flew into Manila and had to spend a night in Manila before we could go. So in the morning, I walk down to the lobby and there are two people arguing. And they're arguing pretty loudly. Like, there's a desk clerk and there's a guest and they're arguing with each other. Both of them Filipino arguing in English. And it took me back. Like, it took me a back for a second. Like, this is. This is crazy. I'm in a foreign country. I know they speak another language here, but they're definitely yelling at each other in English. And he did. So then we go walking around the streets and I hope we can get these pictures into this video so you can see this. But I start taking pictures of things because, like, the do not block intersection sign is written in English and their permits are written in English and like, stamped in the concrete on the, on the sidewalk says Makati City traffic. And. And it's on English. Here's what I've learned since Filipinos start learning English in grade school, in elementary school, in preschool, and they learn it, they study it all the way through college. It's required subject for all schools. It's used in government, it's used in business. Filipinos have to learn English one way or another just to get by. And so here's what I just recently learned from one of my ofs. When the government made English an official language of the Philippines, it was really out of necessity because the first official language of the Philippines, Philippines, was Filipino. And Filipino isn't a natural language. It was a government created language because the base of Filipino is Tagalog with a whole bunch of other languages mixed in. Like, there's a whole bunch of Spanish in Tagalog and there's some Japanese in it. It's a mixture of a whole bunch of languages. And it was kind of government created. Well, the problem is that in the Philippines, all only like 30% of the country speaks Filipino. And so other people. There's 120 languages in the Philippines. Well, there's more than 120 languages, but there's 120 distinct languages. And then there's dialects of that. For people to learn to speak Filipino, often their languages are completely different. They don't speak any Tagalog, they don't have the base of Filipino, so it's really difficult to learn it. And then when you consider that generally if you travel to another place, like locally, they may not speak Filipino either, you're better off just learning English so that you can communicate with people in your own country. Plus, because English is taught in schools and they're constantly exposed to English on TV and movies, it's worth it to just learn it, learn English. So here's the other side of this. Here's a really interesting story from my ofs, Julia, who tells me she's not a native Filipino speaker. She's a native Cebuano speaker. Her husband is a native Filipino speaker, but his parents do not speak Filipino. They speak Ilocano. So Ilocano, Filipino, Cebuano, completely different languages. And Julia is not that good at speaking Filipino and neither are her in laws. Her husband is good at Filipino and at Ilocano, which he grew up with, and at English. So when they're together, they speak English to each other because they. That's the way they can communicate to each other. And actually it's a little bit more complicated than that. They'll use a mixture of Filipino and English to speak to each other. But Julia leans more towards English because her Tagalog isn't that good. So she's just not that good at speaking Filipino, but she's really good at speaking English. So people often ask me if the, if English in the Philippines is good, like can you find good people or is it just going to be weird? Yeah, it's really good. You can find really, really good people. There are definitely a lot of people that speak English, understand English, but they're broken. Like when they speak or they write it, it's broken. It's not. It's not great. But you can find perfect English very, very easily. If you're looking for this when you're recruiting, see if you can find someone who uses slang, who uses English slang. Slang is a really good indicator of how immersed they are in English in their culture rather than consistently or all the time speaking Filipino or all the time speaking Cebuano. If they understand slang, it's because they're doing a lot of English speaking, and that's a good indicator of how well they're gonna write or talk on the phone for.
