Complicates

His being absent complicates matters.

The romantic aspect complicates the story.

Tom's personality complicates matters.

The inherent difficulty of quantifying prosperity complicates the question of which countries are most prosperous.

"This complicates matters," said Gregson. "Heaven knows, they were complicated enough before."

That kind of complicates things.

This further complicates the problem.

I wonder what would have been, if administrators had chosen Chabacano, Philippine Creole Spanish, as an official language in the Philippines, much as administrators had chosen Tok Pisin, an English-based creole, as an official language in Papua New Guinea. Today, Filipinos wax nostalgic and poetic of the bygone Hispanic Era. After the Spanish-American War of 1898, Puerto Rico retained Spanish, but not the Philippines. Like an effervescent pink drink, English is now the main written language in the Philippines. However, the de facto aural-oral lingua franca in the archipelago is Taglish, the patois of code-switching between the two official languages, Filipino (Tagalog essentially) and English. Chabacano (Chavacano) combines Spanish with native elements. There is in Chabacano no verbal conjugation that does exist in Spanish, Tagalog, and English, which complicates these languages. Native languages in the Philippines have oodles of Spanish-derived words embedded in them. Native languages are of the Austronesian family, said to have originated thousands of years ago in Taiwan. About 200 languages exist in the Philippines. Most of them are of the Austronesian family, whilst Chabacano, an outgrowth of Hispanic colonization, sprouted like mushrooms in various places there.