Philippine Hokkien
Philippine Hokkien is a dialect of the Hokkien language of the Southern Min branch, primarily spoken vernacularly by Chinese Filipinos in the Philippines, where it serves as the local Chinese "lingua franca", primarily spoken as an oral language, within the overseas Chinese community in the Philippines and acts as the heritage language of a majority of Chinese Filipinos. The use of Hokkien in the Philippines is influenced by Philippine Spanish, Filipino (Tagalog) and Philippine English. Terminology. The term "Philippine Hokkien" is used when differentiating the variety of Hokkien spoken in the Philippines from those spoken in China, Taiwan , Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and other Southeast Asian countries. Historically, it was also known as "Fookien" or "Fukien" across the country, derived from the Chinese postal romanization of the Nanjing court dialect Mandarin reading of Fujian province in China, such as in the old newspaper, "The Fookien Times". Sociolinguistics. Only 12.2% of all ethnic Chinese in the Philippines have a variety of Chinese as their mother tongue. Nevertheless, the vast majority (77%) still retain the ability to understand and speak Hokkien as a second or third language. History. In the early 17th century, Spanish missionaries in the Philippines produced materials documenting  the Hokkien varieties spoken by the Chinese trading community who had settled there in the late 16th century: These texts appear to record a Zhangzhou dialect of Hokkien, from the old port of Yuegang (modern-day Haicheng, an old port that is now part of Longhai). Education. , the Ateneo de Manila University, under their Chinese Studies Programme, offers Hokkien 1 (Chn 8) and Hokkien 2 (Chn 9) as electives. Chiang Kai Shek College offers Hokkien classes in their CKS Language Center. Linguistic features. Philippine Hokkien is largely derived from the Jinjiang dialect of Quanzhou but has possibly also absorbed influences  from the Amoy dialect of Xiamen and Nan'an dialects of Quanzhou. Although Philippine Hokkien is generally mutually comprehensible especially with other Quanzhou Hokkien variants, including Singaporean Hokkien and Quanzhou-based Taiwanese Hokkien variants, the local vocabulary, tones, and Filipino or Philippine Spanish and English loanwords as well as the extensive use of contractions and colloquialisms (even those which are now unused or considered archaic or dated in China) can result in confusion among Hokkien speakers from outside of the Philippines. Some terms have been shortened into one syllable. Examples include: Vocabulary. Philippine Hokkien, like other Southeast Asian variants of Hokkien  (e.g. Singaporean Hokkien, Penang Hokkien, Johor Hokkien and Medan Hokkien), has borrowed words from other languages spoken locally, specifically Spanish, Tagalog and English. Examples include: Philippine Hokkien also has some vocabulary that is unique to it compared to other varieties of Hokkien: Hokaglish. Hokaglish is code-switching involving Philippine Hokkien, Tagalog and English. Hokaglish shows similarities to Taglish (mixed Tagalog and English), the everyday mesolect register of spoken Filipino language within Metro Manila and its environs. Both ways of speaking are very common among Chinese Filipinos, who tend to code-switch these languages in everyday conversation, where it can be  observed that older generations typically use the Hokkien Chinese sentence structure base while injecting English and Tagalog words while the younger ones use the Filipino/Tagalog sentence structure as the base while injecting the few Hokkien terms they know in the sentence. The latter therefore, in a similar sense with Taglish using Tagalog grammar and syntax, tends to code-mix via conjugating the Hokkien terms the way they do for Filipino/Tagalog words.