Po and opo
Two of the most-used words in the language, and neither of them translates. They do not mean anything. They do something.
What po does
Po is a respect particle. It has no meaning you can put in a dictionary and it does not change what the sentence says. It changes who you are allowed to say it to.
It hooks into the sentence rather than sitting at the end of it, which is why Salamat po and Magandang umaga po both work but Hindi ko po alam puts it in the middle.
| Rank | Tagalog | What it does | Register |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | Salamat poPlay | Thank you (respectful)po is not a word with a meaning, it is a respect marker. It goes in almost anything said to someone older or senior, and leaving it out is the single most common way a learner sounds rude without knowing it. | polite |
| 8 | Hindi poPlay | No (respectful) | polite |
| 25 | Magandang umaga poPlay | Good morning | polite |
| 40 | Dahan-dahan lang poPlay | Slowly, please | polite |
What opo does
Opo is the respectful yes, and it is its own word rather than oo plus po. Use oo with friends, opo with everybody you would use po with.
| Rank | Tagalog | What it does | Register |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | OoPlayKunokuno, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons | Yes | casual |
| 6 | OpoPlay | Yes (respectful)Not optional with elders. Oo to your grandmother is the kind of thing that gets remarked on. | polite |
| 7 | HindiPlay | No / not | neutral |
| 8 | Hindi poPlay | No (respectful) | polite |
Who gets po
- Anybody noticeably older than you, including by a few years.
- Parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and older cousins. Closeness does not remove it. This surprises learners more than anything else here.
- Anybody serving you: drivers, shop staff, waiters, guards.
- Teachers, doctors, officials, and anybody you have just met.
The mistake foreigners make is treating po as formality, and dropping it once a relationship feels friendly. It is not formality, it is deference to age and role, and it stays after you are close. A Filipino adult still says po to their own mother.
The other direction
Using po with somebody your own age is not an error, but it reads as distant, or as a joke. If a Filipino friend laughs when you use it on them, that is why.
Drill the polite formsThe six words that run the language — Tagalog puts a little word in front of every noun to show what it is doing. There are only six of them. No account, nothing to install.The frequency ordering on this site is an informed estimate, not a corpus count. There is no published frequency count for conversational Tagalog, so it prints a rank and never a percentage. When a real count exists, the order changes and this line changes with it.
It teaches Tagalog as spoken around Manila, which is not the same thing as Filipino and is not the whole country. Cebuano and Ilocano are different languages, not accents.
Nothing is drilled until a native speaker has checked it. What has been checked, by whom, and what is still owed is written down on the sources page.
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