Months in Tagalog: Enero to Disyembre, Spanish origins and dates

Spanish month names, Tagalog spelling

The months in Tagalog were borrowed from Spanish, and the Wikipedia article on the language lists them as localised Spanish names. The borrowing kept the Spanish sounds and wrote them with Tagalog letters. Five names needed no change at all or only the capital letter: Enero, Abril, Mayo, Agosto and, almost, Marso, where the Spanish z of marzo is written s.

The others show the same rules as the days of the week. The f of febrero became p, because the old Tagalog alphabet had no f: Pebrero. The j of junio and julio became h: Hunyo, Hulyo. The v of noviembre became b, and the vowel pairs io and ie were written yo and ye: Nobyembre, Setyembre, Disyembre. Oktubre writes the c of octubre as k and the o as u.

September comes from setiembre, the Spanish variant without p, and Wiktionary records Septiyembre beside it along with older spellings. The Tagalog form therefore follows a form that Spanish itself still allows.

Buwan: moon and month

The Tagalog word for month is buwan, and it is also the word for moon. Wiktionary lists both senses under one entry, inherited from Proto-Philippine *bulan, with mes, from Spanish, as a synonym for month. The months of the year are mga buwan ng taon, and Wiktionary's own list of the Gregorian months is headed mga buwan ng kalendaryong Gregoryano.

Wiktionary traces buwan to Proto-Philippine *bulan. On calendars and in dates, the Spanish set from Enero to Disyembre is the one in use.

Capitals, abbreviations and spelling reforms

Tagalog capitalises the months, as Wikipedia's article on the language states for months and days alike. Spanish writes enero and diciembre in lower case, so a Filipino who writes Spanish and Tagalog has to switch habits between the two.

Wiktionary records three-letter abbreviations without a full stop: Ene, Peb, Mar, Abr, May, Hun, Hul, Ago, Set and Dis, and it marks the forms with a full stop, such as Ene., as nonstandard. Wikipedia's Tagalog article gives the abbreviations with a stop.

Spelling reform has touched a few of the months in Tagalog. The Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino's Ortograpiyang Pambansa of 2013, in force from 2014, reinforced etymological spelling of loanwords, and Wiktionary marks Agusto as the spelling before 2014, now Agosto, closer to Spanish. Older spellings such as Septyembre appear in books printed before the reform.

How to write a date with the months in Tagalog

A Tagalog date in words uses the ordinal prefix ika- and the linker ng: ika-25 ng Disyembre, the 25th of December. Wiktionary gives the phrase in its example tuwing ika-25 ng Disyembre, every 25 December. With a month alone the marker is sa: sa Mayo, in May.

The ordinal goes with the day, never with the month: ika-1 ng Enero, the first of January, ika-30 ng Hunyo, the thirtieth of June. Read aloud, ika-25 becomes ikadalawampu't lima, built from the native number.

Birthdays are kaarawan, a derivative of araw, day, which Wiktionary lists among the synonyms of araw for birthday or anniversary.

The months in Tagalog among Philippine languages

Tagalog is not alone in taking its months from Spanish. On the site's months of the year table, Cebuano has Enero, Pebrero, Marso, Abril, Mayo, Hunyo and Hulyo exactly as Tagalog does, and differs only in Septiyembre and Nobiyembre. Kapampangan, spoken north of Manila, keeps the Spanish vowels closer: Eneru, Pebreru, Marsu, Juniu, Octubri. Chamorro in Guam and the Marianas, another language of the former Spanish Pacific, writes Eneru, Febreru and Måtso.

Malay and Indonesian, the large Austronesian languages to the south, show what a different colonial history does to the same calendar. Their months came through English and Dutch, not Spanish: Indonesian Januari, Februari, Maret, Malay Januari, Februari, Mac. A speaker comparing the months in Tagalog with those of Jakarta sees the difference between the Spanish and the Dutch empires in a single row.