Tagalog is an agglutinative Philippine language that is most commonly spoken in the Philippines and the wider Filipino diaspora. It has a standardized variety called Filipino. While officially recognized as separate languages, Tagalog and Filipino are agreed to be linguistically similar by linguists. This article describes the grammar of both Tagalog and Filipino. It should be noted that this article describes the grammar of formal Tagalog as described by linguists and the Philippine government through the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino (KWF). Taglish is the non-standard variety of Tagalog, which actively uses English vocabulary into grammatically Tagalog sentences, and is widely used in urban areas such as Metro Manila. There are also Tagalog-based argots, most notably swardspeak used by the LGBT community.
Tagalog has nine recognized word classes or parts of speech: nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, ligatures, and particles. Nouns do not conjugate; it instead use markers to denote information, such as using the particle mga (pronounced ma-nga) to denote plurality. Pronouns only conjugate for number. However, verbs are morphogically more complex, as it uses affixes (prefixes, suffixes, and circumfixes) to conjugate for trigger in a unique system called the Austronesian alignment.[a]
Adjectives and adverbs do not conjugate, and are always prepositive in nature, and are almost always marked by the prefix ma-. They are connected to the word they are describing through ligatures. There are two ligatures used that depends on the ending letter of the antecedent: the suffix -ng for vowels and the particle na for consonants. Tagalog uses a number of conjunctions, as well as the particle sa to indicate prepositions.
Tagalog is commonly classified as a VSO language, but it also allows construction of sentences in SVO order through the use of the inversion marker ay. A comma can also be used to invert the word order; such style is prevalent in newspapers and media. Tagalog is noted for its flexibility in sentence construction, as a sentence can be rewritten to give emphasis or definiteness.
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