From David Joel Steinberg’s The Philippines: A Singular and a Plural Place:

The Philippines is a singular and plural noun. The name Philippines refers both to an island archipelago and to a country of over 75 million people. It identifies a unified nation with a single people, the Filipinos, and also a highly fragmented, plural society divided between Muslims and Christians, peasants and city dwellers, uplanders and lowlanders, rich and poor, and between the people of one ethnic, linguistic, or geographic region and those of another.

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