Greater Central Philippine Languages Map

Oh, I meant that someone can add the Northern languages and dialects to make it a more complete infographic. Regardless. This is still awesome work.

I see, thanks so much for clarifying. This is pretty interesting.

Thank you! Saved me the time and effort. Haha!

EDIT: But anyway, I'll add more to it. The issue of dialect versus language has never been solved by linguists. There are so many factors like what u/DatuSumakwel7 said such as grammar, lexicon (vocabulary), phonology. But when, let's say, we compare Tagalog to Ilokano, both clearly have distinguishable lexicon and grammar. For example, one way to indicate pluralization in Tagalog is marked by mga, while it's either using the pluralized article dagiti or morphological transformation through syllable-initial reduplication or gemination):

[TAG] mga bata

[ILO] dagiti ubing; ubbing

Gloss: children

[TAG] mga kamay

[ILO] dagiti ima; im-ima

Gloss: hands

[TAG] mga bundok

[ILO] dagiti bantay; banbantay

Gloss: mountains

Note that in comparison to Tagalog, many Visayan languages also use the mga pluralization marker. Pluralization in Ilokano works the same way in several Northern Luzon languages like Ibanag, Pangasinan and Gaddang (Reid, 2006). Reid (p. 9) adds that Kapampangan, also an NL language but belongs under the Central Luzon subgroup, features vowel lengthening to denote plurality.

But this is simply cherry-picking from a small facet out of so many areas that need to be considered in distinguishing two linguistic forms as different languages. Another issue is the Visayan languages which were first considered to form a huge dialect continuum by Zorc (1977) since they share a great deal of lexical and grammatical features. I'm not quite abreast with recent studies on this matter, so I hope Philippine/Austronesian linguists out there could update us.

Clearly, though, you could say any among the Visayan languages is distinct from Tagalog by looking at so many features, so you can say they are both different languages, and not a dialect of something else or one of the other.

Another topic is the difference between Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. In linguistic sense, they are all dialects of a single Scandinavian "language", but politically and out of years of isolated standardizations, they are labelled Swedish, Norwegian and Danish languages. It's slightly similar with the case of Bahasa Melayu and Bahasa Indonesia which are technically both one Malay language but are based on the same Malacca/Riau dialect.

Clearly, despite the unending dialect-language dilemma, many of which the general Filipino public considers as dialects can be attested as languages in their own right. The whole dialect misinformation in Philippine education and mass media is a product of lack of linguistic understanding and appreciation during previous times, and could partially be due to a centralistic national philosophy which aspires to gravitate around Metro Manila.

No I mean like, does anyone have a bunch of phrases or sentences in it haha.

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