MA Linguistics & Southeast Asian Studies, Cornell University
They are different enough that Tagalog and Cebuano are mutually unintelligible.
There are tons of lexical differences, but my favorite false friend is libog, which is “confused” in Cebuano and “horny” in Tagalog.
While the differences are numerous, here are some differences I personally find interesting:
Cebuano doesn’t use reduplication to express different verbal aspects, whereas Tagalog does. For example, Tagalog reduplicates the lu in magluluto “will cook” to express the future tense (prospective aspect) while it’s magaluto in Cebuano, or for a great number of Cebuano dialects, it’s simply magluto.
Going off from that point, Cebuano has for the most part simplified its number of tenses (aspects). For example, some speakers of Cebuano have ginaluto “is cooking” and giluto “cooked” whereas others do away with ginaluto and have just giluto to mean both “is cooking” and “cooked.”
Still on verbs, the Tagalog verbal infix -um- is the prefix mu- (sometimes spelled mo-) in Cebuano. So, Tagalog as sumulat and Cebuano has musulat both meaning “write” though in Cebuano it also means “will write” because of that simplification I previously mentioned.
With regard to phonology, one major historical change is that Proto-Central Philippine *ə has merged with /i/ in Tagalog and /u/ in Cebuano (and most Visayan & Bikol languages). Though the Bohol dialect of Cebuano preserves /ə/.
So this means that something like *bəgas “rice” became Tagalog /bigas/ and Cebuano /bugas/; *dəkət “stick/adhere” is Tagalog /dikit/ and Cebuano /dukut/; and *laləm “deep” is Tagalog /lalim/ and Cebuano /lalum/.
So while Tagalog and Cebuano went from four vowels to three vowels (/a/, /i/, and /u/), the vowels /e/ and /o/ were introduced during the Spanish colonization of the Philippines. Tagalog seems to have integrated these two marginal vowel phonemes more so than Cebuano has.
Syntactically, Cebuano speakers seem to have a greater tendency to place the possessive pronoun before the noun: akong balay (my house) vs. balay nako (house my) whereas Tagalog speakers usually say bahay ko (house my) more than aking bahay (my house). Both constructions are possible in both languages but for some reason, speakers tend to prefer one or another.
This also extends to nouns and verbs. Cebuanos seem to prefer saying Si Juan nag-istorya (John spoke) rather than nag-istorya si Juan (spoke Juan).
I could probably write all night about the differences, but I will stop here.
Bachelor of Science in Nursing at Cebu Doctors' University
I grew up speaking both. Take note, there are many variations of both languages but for the sake of this answer, I will be referring to the standard manner of speaking.
Lexical
The most common similarities are those words borrowed from the Spanish language such as cuchara(spoon), cuarto (room), sapatos (shoes), kumusta (How are you?). Most of these words mean the same in both languages.
But this is where most of the similarities end. Common words such as in greetings vary:
Good morning= Magandang Umaga (T)= Maayong Buntag (C)
Funnily enough, there are words that exist in both languages which mean totally different things:
Langgam= means ant(T)= means bird(C)
This fact is referenced in the joke where the Tagalogs are still crawling, the Cebuanos are already flying!
Syntactical
Sentence formation is a little similar.
I am going to the market.
Tagalog= Pupunta (verb) ako (subject) sa palengke (object).
Cebuano= Mu-adto (verb) ko (subject) sa merkado (object).
Morphological
The manner at which the words are formed are also more or less the same.
Go- to go, going, went
Tagalog= Punta, pupunta, papunta, pumunta
Cebuano= Adto, muadto, muadto, niadto
Phonological
To me they sound the same, since I understand them both. But Tagalog friends have told me that Cebuanos are very emphatic in their speech while Cebuano friends told me Tagalog is very fluid sounding.
I hope this helps!
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