English: This video was recorded by Jose Antonio Gerundio Piscano and Daniel Bogre Udell in New York City, United States. Ilocano is primarily spoken in Luzon, the Philippines, with scattered communities in the US states of Hawaii and California. It is considered the third most popular native language of the Philippines. It is closely related to Balangao language--the two are nearly mutually intelligible--as well as the eastern dialects of the Bontoc language. Ilocano developed its own writing system known as kur-itan which has since fallen out of use, although there are proposals to revive it as a script for instruction in public and private schools, as well as a UC Berkeley proposal to encode it in Unicode. The Province of La Union recognized Ilocano in 2012 as an official and national language of the Philippines, and was the first province in the Philippines to pass an ordinance protecting a native language.

Ilocano is spoken by a little over 7 million people internationally and is a Malayo-Polynesian language within the Austronesian language family.

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