Communication
Taglish
Taglish is the ordinary mix of Tagalog and English in Philippine speech and chat. Fine internally if the customer never sees it. Fatal in the customer thread.
How it works
Do not police Taglish in a team channel as a moral project. Do police it in anything that leaves the company. Some candidates code-switch under stress; the live session shows it. For a U.S. company hiring one Filipino teammate, write this into the brief, the employment contract, and the peso payroll file before the start date. Slack habits do not override the Labor Code, BIR, or NPC. If the local employer of record holds the paper, they run the statutory step; you still owe a clean operating definition so the seat does not fail in week three. Put a number on the example when you budget loaded cost, because a nameless allowance always returns as a December surprise or a missed SLA.
Example: Slack: ‘I’ll send the file later, kain muna.’ Fine. Customer: same sentence. Rewrite before send, then coach.
How it differs
Hiya and pakikisama explain some indirectness. Register is the writing problem.
Common errors
Banning Tagalog among teammates as a ‘professionalism’ rule.
In practice
Treat Taglish as a week-one operating object. Put the expected sentence in the brief: what they send, to whom, by when. Culture words do not replace a template. Write an owner - founder, local employer, or worker - and a date you will look at it again: first cutoff, first holiday, or first miss. If nobody can show a contract clause, a payslip line, a calendar block, or a checklist box, you do not have taglish yet. You have a conversation. Convert the conversation before the person starts, while changing the deal still costs a paragraph rather than a resignation. Re-read the worked example above against the actual hire in front of you. If the numbers in that example cannot be swapped for this seat’s pesos, hours, and start date, the brief is still unfinished.