“Purist” Tagalog speakers, the superannuated academic, and sometimes the man on the street, will all insist that the letter F does not exist in the Tagalog language. One can never hear it, they say, in everyday speech. On the other hand, the same speakers whose parents were more or less educated in the old Hispanized orthography, or later in American English, do in fact use the letter F in pronouncing surnames like Fernandez or first names like Fidel.
