<ul><li>I think you really mean “mag-alágâ”. “Magbantay” means “to guard, keep watch of”. “Mag-alágâ” means “to take care of”.</li><li>Your Tagalog is quite good but I think you just need to brush up on it. Good luck on it. I’m also a Filipino who grew up in another country (Australia, since the age of 4) and have been through what you’re going through. It’s a pity we didn’t grow up maintaining our language I think. I can get by on the grammar quite well now (I’m very frequently exposed to Tagalog even outside the home) but my accent sometimes gets awkward (I think it’s worsened by what seems to be a vocal abnormality I have which makes my intonation unnatural). But there have been instances when people have said I sound very Filipino (when my voice normalises, presumably).</li><li>Oh yes, I use diacritics (“kudlit”) to indicate vowel length and glottal stops which are important in Philippine languages. The acute accent (á, í, ú, é, ó) for long vowels and the circumflex (â, î, û, ê, ô) for vowels ending in a glottal stop. Vowels without diacritics are just short vowels. This is a simplified form (and more suitable for Philippine languages from my perspective as a ‘semi-native/heritage’ speaker). The standard is confusing because it’s stress-based but ordinary Filipinos don’t really notice stress because it’s not really that important in distinguishing words as much as vowel length and glottal stops are. Just ask ordinary Filipinos what the difference between the two “a”s in “labá” (standard diacritic use) is and they probably don’t know, so why mark one “a” but not the other? Even I can’t really hear a difference and I have some understanding of linguistics.</li></ul>