Over 82 million people worldwide speak Filipino. It is the national language of the Philippines, deeply rooted in Tagalog, and used in everyday life and media. It also borrows vocabulary from Spanish due to centuries of colonial influence.
Spanish is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, with over 500 million speakers, mainly in Spain, Latin America, and the United States. It is a Romance language with Latin roots.
Although from different language families—Filipino is Austronesian and Spanish is Indo-European—Filipino contains thousands of loanwords from Spanish, including "mesa", "silya", "sapatos", and even numbers and calendar terms.
Both languages follow a subject-verb-object (SVO) structure, which makes translation more intuitive compared to other language pairs.
Filipino and Spanish both use the Latin script. However, Spanish includes characters like "ñ" and uses accent marks for stress and meaning.
Culturally, both languages share respect for elders, Catholic religious traditions, and social customs. Filipinos inherited many cultural practices from Spanish rule, such as fiestas and naming conventions.