Note 10 — Chapter XXVIII · The Road to Autonomy

Tagalo, Ilocano, and Visayan are the three main dialects that have been evolved into written language by the patience of the Spanish priests in the last couple of hundred years or so. Probably five sixths of the people of the archipelago speak some one of these three dialects. In fact they can hardly be called “dialects,” for there are plenty of books—novels, plays, grammars, histories, dictionaries, etc.—written in Tagalo, Ilocano, or Visayan. Every educated Filipino of the well-to-do classes grows up speaking Spanish and the dialect of his native province, while the latter is the only language spoken by the less fortunate people of his neighborhood, the poorer classes.