About Pinoys

Pinoy is an informal demonym referring to the Filipino people in the Philippines and overseas Filipinos around the world. Filipinos usually refer to themselves as Pinoy or sometimes the feminine Pinay. The word is formed by taking the last four letters of Filipino and adding the diminutive suffix -y in the Tagalog language (the suffix is commonly used in Filipino nicknames: "Ninoy" or "Noynoy" for Benigno, "Totoy" for Augusto, etc.). Pinoy was used for self-identification by the first wave of Filipinos going to the continental United States before World War II and has been used both in a pejorative sense as well as a term of endearment similar to Chicano. Both Pinoy and Pinay are still regarded as derogatory by some Filipinos though they are widely used and gaining mainstream usage.

Pinoy was created to differentiate the experiences of those immigrating to the United States but is now a slang term used to refer to all people of Filipino descent. Mainstream usages tend to center on entertainment (Pinoy Big Brother) and music (Pinoy Idol) which has played a significant role in developing national and cultural identity. Pinoy music impacted the socio-political climate of the 1970s and was employed by both Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos and the People Power Revolution that overthrew his regime. It is more positive than "flip."

Pinoy was coined by expatriate Filipino Americans during the 1920s and was later adopted by Filipinos in the Philippines. According to historian Dawn Mabalon, the historical use has been to refer to Filipinos born or living in the United States and has been in constant use since the 1920s. She adds that it was reclaimed and politicized by "Filipino American activists and artists in the Fil-Am movements of the 1960s/1970s".

The desire to self-identify can likely be attributed to the diverse and independent history of the archipelagic country - comprising 7,107 islands in the western Pacific Ocean - which trace back 30,000 years before becoming a Spanish colony in the 16th century and later occupied by the United States, which led to the outbreak of the Philippine–American War (1899–1902). The Commonwealth of the Philippines was established in 1935 with the country gaining its independence in 1946 after hostilities in the Pacific Theatre of the Second World War had ended. The Philippines have over 170 languages indigenous to the area most of which belong to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. In 1939, then president Manuel L. Quezon renamed the Tagalog language as the Wikang Pambansa ("national language"). The language was further renamed in 1959 as Filipino by Secretary of Education Jose Romero. The 1973 constitution declared the Filipino language to be co-official, along with English, and mandated the development of a national language to be known as Filipino. Since then, the two official languages are Filipino and English.
As of 2003 there are more than eleven million overseas Filipinos worldwide, equivalent to about 11% of the total population of the Philippines.