Philippine Phone Directory

The Republic of Philippines is a state in the Southeast of Asia and in the west of the Pacific  ocean. It is an archipelago of more that 7,000 island of all sizes and shape, some of them inhabited, some of them deserted. The Philippines are inhabited by 92 million people and this makes them the twelfth largest nation in the world, and there are many others that have immigrated out of their country to work abroad (the number of immigrants estimated is 11 million people ).

These people are a very interesting mix of cultures and ethnics, the original inghabitants of these islands were the negritos, then followed the Malays, the Hindu and the Arabs that came to these island and some of them never left back. At the middle of the 15^th century Ferdinand Magellan came to these islands, and also left behind some Spanish, and the war with United States of America left behind some Americans, too. So if you browse the Philippine phone directory, you fill find a very strange combination of names coming from very different parts of the world.

The name of this country comes from the name of the king of Spain that ruled in the period that Ruy Lopez de Villalobos made expeditions in that part of the world., King Phillip the second.

The foreigners were fast absorbed by the numerous indigenous population, and the Spanish and American soldiers and traders married women from Philippine and had children together. Nowadays, the names found in the Philippine phone directory do not reflect the true nation those people belong to, because most probably the Spanish name belonged to the forefather who came to Asia some 500 years ago, and his genes have been log lost. One thing that remained here from the Latin ancestors is the fact that the people of Philippine are a very communicative nation, very talkative and open to foreigners, unlike the other Asian nations that are never expressing their feelings, and try to stay away as much as possible from the ones that come from the west.

The thing inherited from the Americans is the English language. Although Tagalog is the national language in the Republic of  Philippine, this is the second country in the world if you count the number of English speaking people. So, the tourists are very pleasant surprised when they get there and can speak with the natives English. In most of the Asian countries this is a real problem for the tourism industry, because very few of all the personnel in the hotels and the resorts can speak English. Not to mention people you meet on the street, in the towns that you are wiling to visit.