Filipino people

Filipino people
	From left to right: An Ayta man, President Corazon Aquino, Bagobo chieftain Datu Attos, Muslim women's rights activist Yasmin Busran-Lao, President Sergio Osmeña, and actor Cesar Montano.
Total population
	�Philippines��91,077,287 (2007)
Regions with significant populations
	Significant overseas populations; Note: No data available on number of Filipino descendants in Southeast Asia-Pacific, Latin America, China and Spain (approximation for Mexico)
Languages
	Filipino/Tagalog, Bikol, Cebuano, English, Hiligaynon, Ilokano, Kapampangan, Pangasinan, Tausug, Waray-Waray, Spanish,; and over 100 others
Religion
	Predominantly Roman Catholic; Various smaller Christian denominations; Significant Muslim minority, Buddhist, others
Related ethnic groups
	Taiwanese aborigines, Cham, Dayak, Indonesians, Malays, Chamorro, other Austronesians, Bisaya (not to be confused with Filipino Visayans)

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Filipinos or the Filipino people (feminine: Filipina) are citizens of the Philippines, an archipelago in Southeast Asia.^[8] The terms may also refer to people of Philippine descent, regardless of citizenship. There are now over 100 million ethnic Filipinos worldwide.

Colloquially, Filipinos may refer to themselves as Pinoy (feminine: Pinay), which is formed by taking the last four letters of Pilipino and adding the diminutive suffix -y.^[8]

Filipino-Americans have a long, storied history in the United States. Some of the first Asians in California, to those rising up in U.S. politics, Filipino Americans have had an influence on the United States. Farm worker's strikes, fights against oppressive legislation, and memorable community leaders have all shaped and will continue to shape the country.

Many Philippine languages lack /f/ as a phoneme. In these, /p/ is substituted and Filipino is denoted Pilipino.

[edit] Ancestry

[edit] Ancient to Pre-colonial Filipinos

The earliest human remains known in the Philippines are the fossilized fragments of a skull and jawbone of three individuals, discovered on May 28, 1962 by Dr. Robert B. Fox, an American anthropologist of the National Museum.[4]

Physical anthropologists who have examined the Tabon Man skullcap are agreed that it belonged to modern man, homo sapiens, as distinguished from the mid-Pleistocene homo erectus species. This indicates that Tabon Man was Pre-Mongoloid (Mongoloid being the term anthropologists apply to the racial stock which entered Southeast Asia during the Holocene and absorbed earlier peoples to produce the modern Malay, Indonesian, Filipino, and "Pacific" peoples). Two experts have given the opinion that the mandible is "Australian" in physical type, and that the skullcap measurements are most nearly like the Ainus or Tasmanians. Nothing can be concluded about Tabon man's physical appearance from the recovered skull fragments except that he was not a Negrito.[6]

About 30,000 years ago, the Negritos, who became the ancestors of today's Aetas, or Aboriginal Filipinos, descended from more northerly abodes in Central Asia passing through the Indian Subcontinent and reaching the Andamanese Islands.

About 3000 BC, a loose confederation of peoples known as 'Nesiots', from what today is Indonesia, came to the Philippines. They were to become the ancestors of the present-day Luzon and Mindanao hill tribes. There were two waves of successive Nesiot immigration. The first wave saw a people who have light complexions, aquiline noses, thin lips, and deep-set eyes. The second wave of migration were shorter and heavier in physique, having darker complexion, thick lips, large noses, and heavy jaws.

Starting 4000-2000 BC[7] Austronesian groups descended from Yunnan Plateau in China and settled in what is now the Philippines by sailing using balangays or by traversing land bridges coming from Taiwan. Most of these Austronesians primarily used the Philippines as a pit-stop to the outlying Pacific islands or to the Indonesian archipelago further south. Those who were left behind became the ancestors of the present-day Filipinos. Anthropologist F. Landa Jocano of the University of the Philippines contends that what fossil evidence of ancient men show is that they not only migrated to the Philippines, but also to New Guinea, Borneo, and Australia. Jocano further believes that the present indigenous Filipinos are products of the long process of evolution and movement of people. This not only holds true for Filipinos, but for the Indonesians and the Malays of Malaysia, as well. No group among the three is culturally or racially dominant. Currently, These "Malay-Polynesians" comprise around 60-80% of the nation's racial stock & genepool. All of which has already inter blended with the past & future races that settled in the country except for a few tribes isolated by time & geographical barriers.

A 16th century Tagalog couple (transcribed as Tagales) of the Maginoo caste, as depicted in the Boxer Codex.

Since at least the 3rd century, the indigenous peoples were in contact with other Southeast Asian and East Asian nations. Inter-racial marriage has always been a common practice by the indigenous Filipinos. Fragmented ethnic groups established numerous city-states formed by the assimilation of several small political units. Even scattered barangays, through the development of inter-island and international trade, became more culturally and geneticaly homogeneous by the 4th century. Hindu-Buddhist culture and religion flourished among the noblemen in this era. Many of the barangay were, to varying extents, under the de-jure jurisprudence of one of several neighboring empires, among them the Malay Sri Vijaya, Javanese Majapahit, Brunei, Melaka empires, Vietnamese Champa, although de-facto had established their own independent system of rule. Trading links with Sumatra, Borneo, Thailand, Vietnam, Java, China, India, Arabia, Japan and the Ryukyu Kingdom flourished during this era. A thalassocracy had thus emerged based on international trade created the early mixed racial ancestry of pre-colonial filipinos. Nowadays, Majority of Filipinos also share genes with those of Indian, Arabs, Japanese, Okinawan, southern Chinese & other South East Asians.

The Visayan Islands, particularly Cebu had earlier encounter with the Greek traders who intermarried with the locals in 21 AD. The country has a tiny Greek population consisting of no more than ten families in Metro Manila and a slightly larger community in Legazpi, the latter being descended from Greek sailors who settled in the city around a century ago.

Indian presence in the Philippines has been ongoing since prehistoric times along with the Chinese and Japanese, predating even the coming of the Europeans by at least 7 centuries. Indians, together with the natives of the Indonesian Archipelago and the Malay Peninsula, traded with natives and introduced and passed Hinduism and Buddhism to the natives of the Philippines. Most of them stayed in the Philippines where they were slowly absorbed to native society. The Laguna Copperplate Inscription, the first Philippine document dated to 900 AD, shows extensive Hindu-Buddhist influence in the social structure and names of Filipinos of this period.

In 1380, Karim ul' Makhdum, the first Islamic missionary to reach the Sulu Archipelago and Jolo, brought Islam to what is now the Philippines. Subsequent visits of Arab Muslim missionaries strengthened the Islamic faith in the Philippines, concentrating in the south and reaching as far north as Manila. Starting with the conquest of Malaysia by the Portuguese and Indonesia by the Dutch, the Philippines began to receive a number of Malaysian-Arab refugees including several Malaysian princes and displaced court advisors. Vast sultanates were established, comprised of the Sultanate of Maguindanao and the Sultanate of Sulu. Since the first people who established themselves as Sultans in various parts of the Malay Archipelago—Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei and the Philippines—were usually of Arab descent, most people of royal lineage claim Arab descent, some going as far as claiming descent from the Prophet Muhammad himself.

[edit] Spanish colonization

A Tagalog Filipino Spanish mestizo in her wedding attire.

The Spanish conquest between 1521 to 1565, prompted the colonization of the Philippine Islands that lasted for more than 377 years. As with most of the Spanish colonies, marriage to indigenous Filipino women and Spanish men was encouraged. The offspring of Spanish men and indigenous Filipino women may have adopted the culture of their fathers and grand parents, however only a few mixed race families in the Philippines still speak Spanish among themselves^[9];

In some provinces like, Iloilo, the ruling Spanish government encouraged foreign merchants to trade with the locals but they were not given certain privileges like ownership of land. From this contact and social intercourse between foreign merchants, e.g., Chinese, Indians, and especially with the Spanish colonizers, a new culture eventually came into being. A mestiso class was born from a few intermarriages of the Spaniards and merchants with the Malayo-Polynesian natives.[13] Their descendants, emerged later as the more influential part of the ruling class or the Principalía.[14]

The exact percentage of Filipinos with Spanish ancestry is still unknown. However only those Filipinos who possess a clear mixed-race appearance are considered by most as actual mestizos, although even a native looking Filipino, including those with fairer skin, could also have some Spanish ancestry. In the same way, mestizos who are less Spanish looking and possess darker-complexioned skin could be considered more as a "native Filipino" than as an actual mestizo.

The Philippine Statistics Department does not account for the racial background or ancestry of an indivdual. The number of Filipino mestizos that reside outside the Philippines is also unknown, because of the social perception that a person has to look a certain way in order to be considered Mestizo, and also because of the historical stigma associated with having Spanish blood from affairs with local women (las queridas), many mestizos may not be considered as such. These factors have urged some Spanish-Filipino mestizos to hide their Spanish ancestry to avoid the social negative stereo-type stigma by the predominantly indigenous population. It was usually only the offspring of recognized marriages between Spaniards, and indigenous Filipino women that were given general recognition as mestizos.

Although there had been a pre-Hispanic interaction with and presence of people from what is today China, the arrival of the Spaniards to the Philippines attracted further Chinese traders, and maritime trade flourished during the Spanish colonial period. The Spaniards restricted the activities of the Chinese and confined them to the Parián which was located near Intramuros. With low chances of employment and prohibited from owning land and engaging in agriculture, most of the Chinese residents earned their livelihood as petty traders and skilled artisans serving the colonial authorities.

Many of the Chinese who arrived during the Spanish period were Cantonese, who worked as stevedores and porters, but there were also Fujianese, who entered the retail trade. Deeply distrusted by the Spanish authorities, the Chinese resident in the islands were encouraged to intermarry with indigenous Filipinos, convert to Catholicism and adopt Hispanic surnames and customs. Those who refused were either expelled or massacred. As a consequence, most Chinese immigrants in the Philippines were left with no other choice but to integrate themselves into the colonial society. A few wealthy merchants married Spanish mestizos. The children of unions between indigenous Filipinos and Chinese were called Mestizo de Sangley or Chinese mestizos, while those between Spaniards or Spanish mestizos, and Chinese were called Tornatrás and were classified as white together with the Spanish mestizos and Spanish Filipinos. There were a total of six massacres conducted by the Spaniards against the Chinese, two of which were successful. During the American colonial period, the Chinese Exclusion Act^[10] of the United States was also applied to the Philippines.

According to the Syrian Consulate in Makati, the first Orthodox Christians on the islands were Syrian and Lebanese merchants and sailors, who arrived in Manila after the city was opened to international trade.[1] Many of the Lebanese sailors married local women and their descendants have since become Philippine citizens, including the owners of a famous pizzeria in Manila.[1]

The Japanese population in the Philippines has since included descendants of Japanese Catholics and other Japanese Christians who fled from the religious persecution imposed by the Tokugawa shogunate during the Edo period and settled during the colonial period from the 1600s until the 1800s. A sizeable population settled in Manila, Davao, the Visayas and in the 1600s in Dilao, Paco and Ilocos Norte Province. A statue of daimyo Ukon Takayama,

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Filipino people

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Contents

[edit] Ancestry

[edit] Ancient to Pre-colonial Filipinos

[edit] Spanish colonization