With a population of 75 million scattered over 7,107 islands, the Philippines is a multiethnic and a multilingual country. The word 'multilingual' is enough to remind the linguists in the Department of Linguistics of the University of the Philippines (UP) of their gigantic task in relation to these voluminous indigenous languages. In the country, it is only UP Linguistics Department that offers courses and award degrees in pure linguistics. Applied linguistics is offered in the UP College of Education, the UP College of Arts and Letters and other universities. Since the establishment of the UP Department of Linguistics in 1923, the formal inquiry on Philippine languages is made to the fore by the Filipino linguists themselves. One of the distinguished Filipino linguists is in the person of the late Dr. Cecilio Lopez. He was the first one to study the Philippine languages from the scientific point of view. His notable works on Philippine linguistics made him earn the title as the "Father of Philippine Linguistics." It was his proposal, called the "universal approach," which was adopted by the 1971 Constitutional Convention that would eventually lead to the development of Filipino language (Constantino, 1977). (Copied from article).