You pick up "po" fast in Manila. Within a day fast.

It's everywhere. Salamat po. Yes po sir. Ano po? Tagalog speakers stick it onto their English too, which is how I caught it in the first place, and once you notice it you cannot stop noticing it. My favorite version is "Yes sir po," which is really just goin' to town on the respect.

I started using it almost immediately, badly, and the reaction was the same every single time. Eyebrows up, a grin, and usually a follow-up question about where I'd picked it up. If you're a foreigner and you use po? Majorrrr ups.

So let's talk about po, because this tiny word is hiding a whole grammar lesson and a four-hundred-year paper trail.

What po is actually doing

Roughly, po works the way "sir" or "ma'am" works in English. Except better, because Filipinos will happily stack them: "sir po," "ma'am po." Po is genderless, it isn't a noun, and it isn't weirdly militaristic the way sir and ma'am can land on an American ear.

You use it going upward. Younger to older, to strangers, to teachers, to elders, to customers, or really to anyone you just wanna butter up real nice. There's a softer cousin, "ho," for when full po feels like a bit much, but po is the workhorse.

Now the grammar part, stay with me

Po is an ENCLITIC. Scrabble word much? 🤩

An enclitic is a little word that can't stand on its own, so it leans on whatever comes before it. And before you write that off as some exotic foreign thing, English has them too. The 's in "he's clearly gone round the bend from being cooped up too long" is an enclitic. It isn't a word so much as a hitchhiker.

But po is a picky leaner. It wants to sit right after the first chunk of your sentence, which is why you'll hear it in the middle of things instead of tacked onto the end. Sometimes it fuses on entirely, like "ano po?" to check that somebody's still listening, or "opo" when you're agreeing with your whole chest.

That's the part that got me. Po isn't a vocabulary word you memorize. It's an entire grammatical category that English technically owns and almost never bothers with.

Where it comes from

In pre-colonial Tagalog society, the maginoo were the ruling class. A panginoon was an especially wealthy one, and you addressed a panginoon as "poon," which lands somewhere around milord or milady. Poon also still means a religious icon, one of those holy statues carried through the streets during a procession.

So when you say po, you're kinda callin' everybody your lord 😅 Wowza.

It gets better. A Spanish-Tagalog dictionary from 1613 records "oo poon" for "yes, sir." That's your "opo," sitting right there with a four-hundred-year paper trail.

Go back further and poon seems to trace to an old Austronesian root meaning tree trunk, or source. The modern Tagalog word "puno" still means both "tree" and "leader." Same pairing turns up in Ilocano, Kapampangan, and Bikol. An entire language family looked at the person in charge and thought: trunk. Root system. The thing everything else grows out of.

I teach science. You can imagine how much I enjoyed that one.

This is where I got a little giddy.

One of the last things we studied in the Fulbright course was a set of models for understanding culture, and one of them is a tree. The leaves are everything observable: rituals, legends, symbols, policies, and language. The trunk is the unwritten stuff, the expectations and norms nobody says out loud. The root system is core beliefs and assumptions, the deepest and least visible layer of the whole thing.

So there I was, reading about po descending from a word for tree trunk, in a language family where "leader" and "tree" are the same word, thinking about a diagram I'd studied a few months earlier.

Which might be the entire argument for learning a few words when you travel. Language is the leaves. It's the part you can actually reach. Nobody learns a culture's root system in two weeks. But the words are hanging right there, and they're attached to everything underneath.

Po in the afterlife

One more. "Tabi po" is what you say out loud when you're walking through wild areas, or past an anthill.

(Anthills are famously believed to have a small ancient spirit living inside them, but that's a bedtime story for another day.)

The phrase excuses you to the spirits so you don't offend them, of course. Po is still important in the afterlife 👻

Everybody built something

Po is one example of a bigger thing I kept bumping into over there. Every language has invented equipment that the others simply don't have.

Tagalog has "siya," which covers he, she, and they all at once. So does "asawa" for spouse, "anak" for child, "kapatid" for sibling. A Tagalog speaker can talk about a person for an hour without ever assigning them a gender, because the language never asks. It's also why Filipino English speakers swap "he" and "she" so freely. Their first language never once made them choose.

French has "si." If somebody says "you're not going," English makes you answer "yes I am!" with a lot of emphasis and a little hope. French just has a separate word for contradicting a negative. German does it too, with "doch." We're the ones who came up short here.

Spanish has gender agreement, which is legitimately useful. Adjectives and pronouns have to match their noun, so you always know exactly which thing the speaker means, even deep into a long sentence. It is also completely bananas. The chair is feminine but the couch is masculine. "Masculinidad" is feminine. "Feminismo" is masculine. XD

German has "lüften," which I can only describe as house-burping. You open the windows to swap the indoor air for the outdoor air. There's even a heavy-duty version called "Stoßlüften," where you fling everything wide for a few minutes and let the whole place gasp.

And Japanese has "komorebi," the sunlight that filters through the leaves of trees, the interplay between light and shadow. Gorgeous!!

English doesn't have worse versions of these. English doesn't have them.

You don't need a plane ticket

All of this got me thinking about home.

We ran an informal survey of our student body last year. 320 kids, more than 35 home languages, and I'd bet real money that undercounts it. Spanish and Russian were the biggest two, though it shifts every single year. We even have a few students who speak Tagalog :)

I already pull cognates into my instruction wherever I can, which I hope shows my students that foreign languages aren't always so "foreign." And this year I'm hoping to partner with our Spanish teacher on her alebrijes project. Students build their creature, then describe its adaptations and how those adaptations increase its fitness. Ecology unit, handled.

TL;DR

1. Learn a few phrases before you go. Badly is fine. Especially badly, honestly.

2. Start with the languages already in your building. You almost certainly have more than you think.

3. Cognates are a free bridge. They make an unfamiliar language look a whole lot less unfamiliar.

4. Go find your language teacher. I promise they've been waiting.

Two letters. Means nothing by itself. Can't even stand up without leaning on something. And it carries an entire culture's posture toward other people.

Peace out po-bros ✌️