Short answers, pulled from the story.
Cebuano is an Austronesian language spoken in the southern Philippines, primarily by Bisaya people and other ethnic groups. It serves as the lingua franca of Central Visayas, most of Mindanao, and western parts of Eastern Visayas, with speakers also found in the Davao Region, Caraga, and parts of Luzon.
The earliest known record of Cebuano dates to 1521, when Antonio Pigafetta, an Italian explorer on Ferdinand Magellan's expedition, compiled a word list from the region. A report from 1567 CE also describes how natives wrote the language.
Speakers in parts of Leyte, Northern Mindanao, the Davao Region, Caraga, and Zamboanga Peninsula object because they trace their ancestry to Bisaya communities native to their own regions, not to immigrants from Cebu. They identify their language as Binisaya and their ethnicity as Bisaya.
Cebuano borrowed words from Malay (for example, "sulat" meaning to write and "pilak" meaning silver), Sanskrit ("bahandi" meaning wealth), and Arabic ("salamat" meaning thank you), with the last two transmitted indirectly through Malay. Spanish is the single largest source of loanwords, especially in the numeral system.
Standard Cebuano is based on the Carcar-Dalaguete dialect of southeastern Cebu, historically known as the Sialo dialect. The Catholic Church adopted this variety in its earliest Latin-script transcriptions of the language.
Vicente Yap Sotto is generally credited as the founder of Cebuano written literature, having written "Maming" in 1901. An earlier patriotic work by Sotto was published a year after "Maming" due to American censorship during the US occupation of the Philippines.