If you’ve ever spoken to a Tagalog speaker, they may have trouble with pronouns in English. My parents came over as professionals that are fluent in English. They speak English 70% of the time. They’ve lived in the US for nearly 50 years and they still fuck up pronouns.
This is because there is no “he” or “she”. There’s just siya which encompasses both (all) genders.
Fuuun fact, our word for spouse isn’t gendered either! Husband/wife = asawa
Boyfriend/girlfriend = katipan, kasintahan; alternately, if you wanna be “young and cool”, jowa or syota, both of which are gender neutral! In fact, the only gendered term for boyfriend/girlfriend I can think of is nobyo/nobya, which is from our Spanish colonizers’ novio/novia.
One more thing, as people above in the notes were lol-ing at how Filipinos literally died to be called Filipino, a Spanish colonizer term in and of itself–
You’re right, but also wrong. See, under Spanish occupation, pure native-born Filipinos were not called Filipinos. We were Indio(s).We weren’t even given the dignity of being named for the islands we were born in. The Filipinos (also called insulares) during the Spanish occupation were pure-blood Spaniards who were born in the Philippine Islands. THEY were the Filipinos, not us. We were just Indios to them.
So you see, when we say we fought to be called Filipino, it means we claimed that name from the Spanish colonizers.
