How to Greet in Tagalog

As mentioned in the previous post, Tagalog is formal Filipino, but in the following posts, we will use Tagalog and Filipino interchangeably to mean informal or conversational Tagalog.

Filipinos are good English speakers and usually mixed their language with English, so "Hello" and "Hi" are understood by almost everyone. These words are usually used by acquaintance when seeing each other. In addition to "Hi" and "Hello", here are a few greetings that can get you started. 

Good morning - Magandang umaga
Good afternoon - Magandang hapon
Good evening - Magandang gabi

Explanation

The words umaga, hapon, and gabi mean morning, afternoon, and evening respectively. The word magandang with root word maganda literally means "beautiful." The word magandang is a contraction of "maganda ang", where ang  means "the." Therefore, the full form of "Magandang umaga" is really "Maganda (beautiful) ang (the) umaga (morning)"  or "The morning is beautiful."

Filipinos usually say "Kumusta ka?" (How are you?) or often times "Kumusta?" omitting ka (you) when they see each other. Persons who have not seen each other for a while usually say "Anong balita?" or "What's new?" when seeing each other. Anong with root word "ano" means "what" and "balita" means "news."

Sample Conversation

The following is a sample conversation of two ladies who have just seen each other.

Anna: Magandang umaga (Good morning).
Maria: Magandang umaga rin.  (Good morning also. The word rin means also.)
Anna: Kumusta ka? (How are you?)
Maria: Mabuti naman ako. (I'm fine). Ikaw? (You?)
Anna: Mabuti rin. (I'm fine also.)

Notes:

1. Ikaw literally means "you" (singular).
2. Mabuti naman means "fine" and ako means "I."
3. W
4. In English, to show politeness, we usually add "Thank you." after "Im fine." The phrase "Mabuti naman." in Tagalog is polite enough though. The phrase thank you is "Salamat" in Tagalog. This means we can insert Salamat after Mabuti naman in the fourth line in the Sample Conversation making it: Mabuti naman (I'm fine). Salamat (Thanks). Ikaw (You)?