Convert Tagalog to Mandarin
It's called 'Chinatown' for a reason.

First, the Chinese Empire has an enormous geopolitical presence spanning most of Asia and holds the largest population in the world. The Philippine Protectorate, on the other hand, is theme-wise a relatively small corporate protectorate without a lot of geopolitical sway. Tagalog is meant to be a representative of various South-Eastern languages, but sort of ignores the 500lb gorilla that is China.

Second, Chinese culture and influence is fairly prevalent in Withmore (enough that there's a Chinatown) and sees a lot of use in character backgrounds.

I also get the impression that OOCly, its relative obscurity makes Tagalog a bit of an unpopular choice while Mandarin would have more recognition and draw.

Hopefully this would be a relatively minor OOC change that would better represent China's presence in the world, lore and in Withmore itself, giving some scale to the size of their population and their influence abroad.

As a new player, my assumption was that something happened to China such that Mandarin was not a viable option.

If China is part of the lore and / or still relevant in the present day, then Mandarin should definitely replace Tagalog.

China had taken over most of that area in the early 2000's. Then they lost pretty much all of their army in 2018 then had an economic collapse in 2031. During all this time you had the people of south-ease Asia intermingling and the languages melding (aside from Japan who held themselves separate). The result? One dominant language called Tagalog (probably a mash between it and Chinese languages) with regional dialects.

Why Tagalog? I am assuming that this was an intentional choice by staff. Perhaps Manila had a huge influence on China after they lost their military and were sucking it economically. In the end you have one language that covers all of south-east Asia. Some speak it with a Mandirin dialect. Some with a Thai dialect. Some with a Korean dialect. But it's all Tagalog bakas!

I see the as the same for Euro in Europe, Spanish for central and south America and Farsi for the middle east. The tongues mixed to a standard core for each major landmass with regional dialects. Of course, this is just the way I've come to justify the limited selection of languages and make it jive with the timeline. I do not claim this as "the truth."

Johnny also throws in his thoughts on the matter of "Languages and countries" here: https://www.sindome.org/bgbb/open-discussion/anything-really/languages-and-countries-876/