The Filipino people are the citizens of the Republic of the Philippines. The term is also often used to refer to a person having Filipino ancestry. There are about 92,000,000 Filipinos in the Philippines[17] and about 11,000,000 outside the Philippines. Most Filipinos refer to themselves colloquially as "Pinoy" (feminine: "Pinay"), which is a slang word formed by taking the last four letters of "Pilipino" and adding the diminutive suffix "-y". The pre-1987 Philippine alphabet (Abakada)'s lack of the letter "F" had caused the letter "F" to be substituted with "P". This is the reason, when the 28-letter modern Filipino alphabet has been made official in 1987, the name Filipino was preferred over Pilipino.
