
CHAPTER II 
SPEECH 
ACH of the many Philippine tribes or nationalities 
k talks a language of its own, and some have their 
proper speech divided into several dialects. But 
all these tongues without exception go back to a common 
root form. This basis of Philippine speech recurs in 
Malay, as well as in the numerous languages of Celebes, 
Borneo, Java, Sumatra, and the smaller islands. The 
same fundamental tongue spread, at some remote 
time, northward to Formosa, and even across the vast 
breadth of the Indian Ocean to Madagascar off the 
shores of Africa. 
Popularly, this generic East Indian speech, or rather 
language basis, is known as Malay, but in reality 
Malay is only one of some hundreds of local forms into 
which it has gradually diversified. At no great interval 
before the Portuguese discovery, the Malay proper, with 
his home on the Asiatic peninsula now named after him, 
had become converted to Islam, taking over with the 
new religion a superior political capacity and a restless, 
propagandizing spirit. These qualities carried him, as 
conqueror, pirate, trader, or settler, to the shores of 
many of the East Indian islands—Mindanao is an 
example—in which until then the kindred natives had 
lived with much less contact with the outside world. 
The Malay dialect thus became associated with the 
spread of Mohammedanism, and established as the 
language of commerce and diplomacy. This dominance 
led to its name being applied to the entire mass of 
languages of which it was only one member, although in 
certain respects the most conspicuous. On the side of 
literary achievement, Javanese, especially in its ancient 
Sanskrit-impregnated form known as Kawi, has a much 
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