Some dated and some current tense State Department career info which may be of assistance to you:

1. The FSO exams now can be disassembled, ie, you can be evaluated for other than a bottom rank FSO career appointment based on your total life experience and education, provided what you have been doing is relevant to the then current needs of the Foreign Service.

2. You can also non-competitively be evaluated (again, so-called disassembled exam) for appointment into the Foreign Service Staff (FSS). The FSS assignments are more the jack of all trades starting point.

Hope these few snippets may be of informational assistance to you. My wife years ago, long ago, took the old FSO written exams, knocked the top out (a Cornell U. brain and languages major) and then declined to take the oral board follow up exam...for fear she would get into the Foreign Service!

Instead, she took a career appointment with the Organization of American States based at the OAS HQ in Washington, doing occasional TDY travel but always back to home in DC area. Her work with the OAS, in the Office of Educational Affairs, allowed her to become proficient in Spanish, Portugese, Italian, some German and some Greek. She majored in French in college and just improved on that language, French, in her work in a practical manner.

A non-US national wife I think is still a killer, however, in terms of security clearance. Have no idea what working on and toward US citizenship would or would not do for her, hence for you.

Tagolic as you know is an off-shoot of Spanish, unique to the Philippines.

Good luck.