Albrave Raphael Albayda

Author directory

2026

Large language model safety training is concentrated in English. We test whether the resulting refusal behavior extends to Tagalog and Taglish, a Tagalog–English mixed register used in everyday conversation. We translate all 313 StrongREJECT prompts into both forms and evaluate 29 models from nine model providers, obtaining 27,042 responses. Seven models give jailbreak responses to more than 10% of Tagalog prompts whose English versions they answered safely; five exceed 20%, and one reaches 32.7%. For nine models, an exact McNemar test finds more jailbreak responses in Tagalog than in English (p<0.05), six of them after Bonferroni correction. Tagalog jailbreaks are concentrated in smaller models. Taglish prompts produce fewer jailbreaks than monolingual Tagalog prompts, contrasting with prior results from programmatically constructed code-switching.