The Gay Language of the Philippines

Tagalog has 28 million native speakers and another 45 million second-language speakers in the Philippines, plus 3-4 million in the rest of the world.  It is in the Austronesian family, related to the Pacific island languages of Fiji, Samoa, Hawaii, and New Zealand, with strong influence of Spanish from 300 years of colonial rule (days of the week, months of the year,  and most numbers derive from Spanish).

Beki, or Swardspeak, is a Tagalog-English patois that gay Filipino men used to communicate with each other in the old closet days.  Now it's more or less mainstream, used by entertainment folk and anyone aspiring to sound witty and cool.

It's loaded with pop culture references, most with a complicated etymology:

Catch: Julie Andrews
Debt: Oprah Winfrey
Give: Debbie Gibson
Horny: Ella Fitzgerald
Hungry: Tom Jones
Lesbian: Lulu
Old: Thundercats

And modified English words:

Beautiful: Ganders  (you're taking a "gander")
Boyfriend: Bufra
Cheap: Chucky
Hustler: Colbam ("Callboy")
Oral Sex: Hada ("Head")
Penis: Nota

Gay is Uranus, maybe because gay men used to be called Uranians, or maybe because of the connotation with anal sex.







There are also many Tagalog puns, visual images, and mispronunciations that take you awhile to figure out.

Long: Portugal  (it's a long, narrow country).

Masturbate: Nueva Viscaya  (the capital of that province is Bayombong, which sounds like the word for "bounce")

Naked: Oblation (??)

Nothing; Washington DC (a mispronounciationof walang bagay)

Testicles: Werlog (itlog= egg)