You mean unprovoked? About 3-6% speak it to me. The rest either speak broken English or sit there silent, sullen and don't say anything. Some smile and don't say anything. Some walk on by stooped, giving me side glances filled with moist sadness and shyness.
If you walk into a room of Filipinos speaking their language, they often immediately switch to English.
When they are spoken to in Tagalog, then they in 70% of cases reply in Tagalog. Some 10% say-" Oh, marunong ka pala magtagalog. Ang asawa mo Filipina?" "Oh, you can speak Tagalog, is your wife a Filipina?" These people somehow associate language ability with having a wife ( not studying a book)
Some 5% reply in tense, terse English even if spoken to in Tagalog while looking nervous and uptight. All the smiles are gone.
In some faraway provinces, they speak to you in Tagalog because they don't know English and Tagalog is not their language either so they use it as a foreign language.
A white Tagalog speaker is an oxymoron and does not exist in the mind of an average Filipino. Some react as if they heard fish talk. Or a cat bark.
This kind of behavior- a left over from colonial/military occupation is prevalent throughout the Mongoloid world.
A rare event, as rare as a four leave clover would be for a Filipino ( or Japanese, Korean, Chinese, etc.,) to ask you for directions even you have lived in that town for 20 years but they have just arrived.
To me, this behavior is illogical and unreasonable. After all, they are in their country and I am the one who should adjust to them. The way it would be in Europe and the Americas. A foreigner in Costa Rica is expected to speak Spanish and is addressed in Spanish.
Their heads are just screwed on differently, I guess.
Malaki titi.
That is
malaKING titi.. I recommend buying a Tagalog grammar book and studying it for a month.
