[5] Other centers where Spanish-speaking populations can be found include the cities of Cebu, Iloilo and Zamboanga.

[6] Most native Philippine Spanish speakers are part of the country's middle and upper classes.

[27] Philippine Spanish phonology has been described as conservative and refined, reflecting the socioeconomic status of its speakers, and exhibiting features largely present in the standard dialects of Peninsular Spanish as spoken in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,[29] with little influence from dialects such as Andalusian or Canarian nor from languages like Catalan or Galician despite significant immigration to the Philippines from those areas of Spain.

[5] As in some dialects in northern Spain and some bilingual zones (Bolivia, Paraguay, and Peru) of Latin America,[32] Philippine Spanish has a phonological distinction between the sounds represented by ll (/ʎ/) and y (/ʝ/).

[33][34] For example, calle ('street') is pronounced /ˈkaʎe/ (Tagalog kalye) as opposed to the pronunciation /ˈkaʝe/ found in most other present-day Spanish varieties.

[35] The phoneme /ʎ/ may be realized closer to [lj] in the pronunciation of some younger Philippine Spanish speakers.

[36] While yeísmo, which merges the two, is today considered extremely rare and idiosyncratic in Philippine Spanish,[33] it has been suggested that a more yeísta pronunciation was previously standard owing to the influence of both Andalusian and Mexican Spanish speakers in the 16th and 17th centuries,[37] as suggested by words such as caballo ('horse'), pronounced /kaˈbajo/ in many Philippine languages and with the spelling reflecting this pronunciation (e.g., Tagalog kabayo).

[38] Speakers only shifted to a contrasting pronunciation, which was characteristic of the aristocratic Castilian pronunciation of the time, toward the end of the 19th century in the final years of Spanish colonization,[37] although it has been suggested that a residual yeísmo continues to persist in the speech of modern-day Philippine Spanish speakers.

[38] Although seseo remains the dominant pronunciation today,[42] in a similar way to the introduction of a contrast between y and ll at the end of the 19th century, some native speakers have begun practicing distinción,[43] where /θ/ is distinguished from /s/, but do not always do so consistently.

[46] Of particular note is the pronunciation of intervocalic /d/, where it can even overlap with and is occasionally pronounced as [ɾ] as is the case in the Philippine languages.

Occasionally these may be affricated instead, becoming [dʒ] and [tʃ] respectively as in the case of Spanish loans to the Philippine languages (cf.

[52] Unlike many Peninsular and Latin American dialects, syllable-final /s/ is not debuccalized, and is always pronounced as an alveolar sibilant ([s]) rather than as a glottal fricative ([h]).

[56] This is also present when the word is preceded by a pause, which in other Spanish dialects would be subject to consonantal linking (similar to the liaison in French).

[50] Despite this distinction certain words in the Philippine Spanish lexicon nevertheless reflect this earlier tendency to interchange both sounds, such as balasar, a variant of barajar ('to shuffle') which the dialect had preserved.

[65] This also happens with the third-person possessive pronoun su, which parallels Latin American usage with speakers alternating between, for example, Este perro es suyo (lit.

[67] In expressing derivation, the most commonly-used suffix for creating diminutives in Philippine Spanish is -ito, although -illo is also encountered but less commonly.

For example, Philippine Spanish speakers often pair adverbial no with tan and tanto (or even tantito), both implying extent, as a substitute for no muy ('not very') and no mucho ('not much') respectively.

[73] In a similar manner, Philippine Spanish speakers also often substitute tampoco ('neither') with también no (lit.

'Philippinisms'), vocabulary and expressions that are unique to the dialect, of which some have even entered Spanish more broadly and others which have influenced the native languages of the Philippines.

[61] Although there are efforts in documenting filipinismos, and people studying Spanish as a foreign language today still learn and use Philippine Spanish vocabulary,[78] many of them are in danger of disappearing due to the "foreignization" of Spanish language education in the Philippines (as Peninsular instead of Philippine Spanish is taught in schools), alongside poor documentation practices which lead to, among others, some expressions not being documented and some whose origin is obscured, and a lack of a stronger effort to compile a comprehensive dictionary of these expressions, or at least to include them in the Diccionario de la lengua española.

[85] In certain cases some words are used by speakers in a more-or-less equal proportion, such as with the Peninsular melocotón and the Latin American durazno to describe a peach.

[90] Unique words and expressions in Philippine Spanish can be broadly placed into four categories: Many filipinismos that are commonly used in the Philippines, such as pan de sal and cundimán, by both Spanish and non-Spanish speakers alike have yet to be recognized by the RAE,[103] and calls have been made for their inclusion.