Tagalog

The Tagalog are an Austronesian people of the Philippines, concentrated around Manila Bay and southern Luzon. Their name is commonly derived from tagá-álog, meaning people of the lowlands. The Laguna copperplate inscription of 900, partly in Old Malay, names Tondo; Song records from 971 mention the trading polity of Ma-i.

Their barangays, led by datus and ordered into nobles, freemen and bondsmen, traded with China, Malacca and Brunei. Around 1500 the Bruneian sultan Bolkiah founded Muslim-ruled Maynila across the Pasig River from Tondo. In 1571 Miguel López de Legazpi seized Manila and made it the Spanish colonial capital; most Tagalogs subsequently converted to Roman Catholicism.

Friars printed the first Tagalog dictionary in 1613, and the poet Francisco Baltazar wrote Florante at Laura in the early nineteenth century. During the British occupation of Manila in 1762, refugees carried Tagalog into Bulacan and Nueva Ecija.