Malayan pioneers

Malays made a large contribution to Philippine history, and influenced modern-day lifestyles of Filipinos. The Malay language was the lingua franca of the archipelago prior to Spanish rule. Due to the religious history of the Malay Archipelago.

Although the modern Philippines does not have a huge majority or minority of Ethnic Malays today (Filipinos who identified as Ethnic Malay make up 2% of the total population), the descendants of Ethnic Malays have been assimilated into the wider related Austronesian Filipino culture, characterized by Chinese and Spanish influence, and Roman Catholicism. Malay cultural influence is still strong in the culturally conservative regions of Mindanao, southern Palawan, the Sulu Archipelago, and to some extent in rural of the Visayas and Luzon, where much Malay involvement and intermixing came during the classical era.

In the modern-day, the closest cultural population to Malays are the Moro peoples, the native Islamized populations of the Philippines that inhabit Mindanao, Sulu Archipelago, parts of Visayas and Metro Manila and its environs. They follow a culture and lifestyle somewhat similar to Malays (predominantly in dress code and religion), although this culturally differs in the areas that these groups follow traditions native to or unique to the Philippines, such as cuisine, traditional music, and language (which belong to the Visayan, Danao, and Sangiric branches of Philippine languages, and Sama-Bajaw languages).