Ethnicity

According to the 2000 census, 28.1% of Filipinos are Tagalog, 13.1% Cebuano, 9% Ilocano, 7.6% Bisaya/Binisaya, 7.5% Hiligaynon, 6% Bikol, 3.4% Waray, and 25.3% as "others",which can be broken down further to yield more distinct non-tribal groups like the Moro, the Kapampangan, the Pangasinense, the Ibanag, and the Ivatan.[137] There are also indigenous peoples like the Igorot, the Lumad, the Mangyan, the Bajau, and the tribes of Palawan. Negritos, such as the Aeta and the Ati, are considered among the earliest inhabitants of the islands. Filipinos generally belong to several Asian ethnic groups classified linguistically as part of the Austronesian or Malayo-Polynesian speaking people.It is believed that thousands of years ago Austronesian-speaking Taiwanese aborigines migrated to the Philippines from Taiwan, bringing with them knowledge of agriculture and ocean-sailing, eventually displacing the earlier Negrito groups of the islands. They were later supplanted by arrivals of Chinese and Japanese in the northern islands, and Malays and Arabs in the southern islands. Later arrivals during the colonial period include Indians, Spaniards, Americans, as well as other European peoples. Intermarriage between the groups is evident in the major cities and urban areas.Their descendants are known as mestizos. The two most important non-indigenous minorities include the Chinese and the Spaniards. Chinese Filipinos, mostly descended from immigrants from Fujian, China after 1898, number 2 million, although there is an estimated 28 million Filipinos who have partial Chinese ancestry, stemming from precolonial Chinese migrants. Meanwhile, the exact number of Spanish Filipinos remains unknown, but genetic studies extrapolated that 3.6% of all Filipinos have West European ancestry, most probably Spanish. Other significant minorities include Americans, mostly White, numbering 300,000 and Koreans, numbering 96,000.