Baybayin & Philippine Scripts

Baybayin has 17 letters. Three are vowels, ᜀ a, ᜁ e or i and ᜂ o or u, used only at the start of a syllable. The other fourteen are consonants, and each one is a whole syllable ending in a: ᜃ ka, ᜄ ga, ᜅ nga, ᜆ ta, ᜇ da, ᜈ na, ᜉ pa, ᜊ ba, ᜋ ma, ᜌ ya, ᜎ la, ᜏ wa, ᜐ sa and ᜑ ha. That is the order Unicode uses and the order most modern charts teach, the same family order as the Indian scripts baybayin ultimately descends from: velars, dentals, labials, then the semivowels and sibilants.

Two things surprise learners. Baybayin had no separate letter for r: ᜇ wrote both da and ra, because in old Tagalog the two sounds were variants of one another. Unicode added a distinct ᜍ ra in 2021 for writers who want to keep them apart, together with ᜟ, an old ra shape found in a Sambal manuscript tradition that is not commonly taught. And ng is a single letter, ᜅ nga, just as it is in the modern Filipino Alphabet & Accent Marks collection, where NG still counts as one letter of the 28.

The sounds baybayin cannot write are the ones Tagalog did not have: there is no letter for c, f, j, q, v, x or z, and e and i, like o and u, share a mark. Spanish and English borrowings are respelt by sound, so Jessica becomes ᜇ᜔ᜌᜒᜐᜒᜃ (dyesika) and Victor ᜊᜒᜃ᜔ᜆᜓᜇ᜔ (biktor). A chart that offers you a baybayin letter for f or v has invented it.

How baybayin works: kudlit marks and the vowel killer

Baybayin is an abugida, a script in which the consonant letter carries a vowel of its own and small marks change it. The mark is called a kudlit. Written above the letter, ᜒ turns a into e or i, so ᜊ ba becomes ᜊᜒ bi and ᜃ ka becomes ᜃᜒ ki; written below, ᜓ turns it into o or u, so ᜊᜓ is bu and ᜃᜓ ko. A syllable that starts with a vowel uses the standalone vowel letters: ᜀᜃᜓ ako, 'I', is a plus ko.

The pre-colonial script had no way to write a consonant without a vowel, so a syllable's final consonant was simply left out and the reader supplied it from context: baybayin itself came out as ᜊᜊᜌᜒ, Pilipinas as ᜉᜒᜎᜒᜉᜒᜈ. In 1620 the Augustinian friar Francisco López, printing an Ilocano catechism, added a small cross under the letter to cancel its vowel, the krus-kudlit, encoded as ᜔. Tagalog writers of the time declined to adopt it, but nearly everyone writing baybayin today uses it: ᜊᜌ᜔ᜊᜌᜒᜈ᜔ is baybayin spelt in full, ᜐᜎᜋᜆ᜔ salamat, ᜋᜑᜎ᜔ ᜃᜒᜆ mahal kita.

Some modern writers prefer a mark with no missionary history, the pamudpod ᜕, a small stroke borrowed from the Hanunó'o script, where ᜴ does the same job. Unicode gave baybayin its own pamudpod in 2021, so ᜊᜌ᜕ᜊᜌᜒᜈ᜕ is a valid alternative spelling. The script runs left to right, and sentences are closed with the two Philippine punctuation marks ᜵ and ᜶, a single and a double bar that work like a comma and a full stop; they are encoded once, in the Hanunó'o block, and serve all four scripts.

Where baybayin comes from, and why it is not 'alibata'

Baybayin belongs to the Brahmic family of scripts, which spread from India across Southeast Asia; its closest relatives are the scripts of Sulawesi and Sumatra such as Buginese Lontara, and its ancestor is the Kawi script of Java that also wrote the Laguna Copperplate Inscription of 900 AD, the oldest written document found in the Philippines. By the time Spanish ships arrived in the 16th century, the Tagalogs, Visayans, Ilocanos, Bikolanos, Pangasinenses and Kapampangans all wrote variants of one script, scratched on bamboo and palm leaves with a knife.

The name comes from the Tagalog root baybay, 'to spell', and is first recorded in 1613. Each people had its own name for its own form: Cebuano (Bisaya) Alphabet & Badlit, Ilocano Alphabet & Kur-itan and Bikol Alphabet & Basahan Script each tell the story from their side, and all three forms are typed with the same Unicode characters as baybayin. Kulitan, the Kapampangan Alphabet script written in vertical stacks, is a separate tradition with no Unicode characters of its own. The word alibata, which older Filipino textbooks used, was coined in 1914 on the mistaken idea that the script came from Arabic, named after the first Arabic letters alif, ba, ta; it is still typed into search boxes but scholars and the revival movement have dropped it.

The oldest surviving baybayin text in quantity is the Doctrina Christiana printed in Manila in 1593, the first book printed in the Philippines, which gives its Tagalog prayers in both Latin letters and baybayin. Its alphabet page sorts the letters in a native order quite unlike the Unicode one: the vowels, then ᜑ ᜉ ᜃ ᜐ ᜎ ᜆ ᜈ ᜊ ᜋ ᜄ ᜇ ᜌ ᜅ ᜏ. Under Spanish rule the Latin alphabet took over within a century or two, and by the 18th century baybayin had fallen out of everyday use among lowland Filipinos.

Hanunó'o, Buhid and Tagbanwa: the Philippine scripts still in use

Three sister scripts never died. In the uplands of southern Mindoro the Hanunó'o and Buhid Mangyan peoples write their languages in scripts of the same family, and on Palawan the Tagbanwa do the same. All three are incised into bamboo with the point of a knife, in columns that run from the bottom up, and read in horizontal lines from left to right. The Hanunó'o script is the liveliest: literacy in it is high even without schooling, because young people learn it to memorise and exchange ambahan, poems in seven-syllable lines carved on bamboo tubes, and it is also used for letters and notices.

The grids above show how closely the four scripts match. Hanunó'o has the same 18 letters as modern baybayin, ᜠ ᜡ ᜢ and ᜣ ka to ᜱ ha, with ᜲ and ᜳ as its kudlit marks and the pamudpod ᜴ to cancel a vowel, a mark the Dutch anthropologist Antoon Postma introduced to the Mangyan in the 1950s and that they adopted. Buhid, written by the Buhid Mangyan, also has three vowels and fifteen consonants from ᝃ ka to ᝑ ha, with ᝒ and ᝓ as vowel marks but no vowel killer, so final consonants are still left unwritten, as in old baybayin.

Tagbanwa, from the Aborlan and central Palawan Tagbanwa and adopted in the 20th century by the Pala'wan people further south, who call it Ibalnan, is the smallest set: three vowels and thirteen consonants, ᝣ ka to ᝰ sa, with no letters for ra or ha and no vowel killer; ᝲ and ᝳ are its vowel marks. It is the most endangered of the four, as younger Tagbanwa switch to Cuyonon and Tagalog. All three scripts went into Unicode in the same release as baybayin, version 3.2 in March 2002, in the blocks Hanunoo (U+1720), Buhid (U+1740) and Tagbanwa (U+1760).

Baybayin today: tattoos, banknotes, keyboards and fonts

Baybayin is the script of a revival. Since 2010 every Philippine peso banknote of the New Generation Currency series has carried the word ᜉᜒᜎᜒᜉᜒᜈᜓ Pilipino in baybayin, and the Philippine e-passport issued from 2009 prints a verse of Proverbs in baybayin on its inside pages. Bills to make baybayin the national writing system have been filed in Congress several times, from House Bill 1022, approved by a House committee in 2018, to Senate Bill 1866 in 2023; none had become law at the time of writing. The script is on shirts, murals, logos and above all tattoos, where accuracy matters because a kudlit on the wrong side changes the word: ᜊᜒ is bi, ᜊᜓ is bu.

To write a name, split it into syllables by sound, not by English spelling, then take the consonant letter for each syllable and add the kudlit for its vowel: Maria is ᜋᜇᜒᜌ (ma-ri-ya, using ᜇ or the modern ᜍ for r), Jose ᜑᜓᜐᜒ (ho-se), Andres ᜀᜈ᜔ᜇ᜔ᜇᜒᜐ᜔ with cross kudlits on the n, d and s. Do not transliterate letter by letter: 'Christine' has no c, h or final e in baybayin, it is ᜃ᜔ᜇᜒᜐ᜔ᜆᜒᜈ᜔ kristin. A baybayin 'translator' online does exactly this syllable swap; check its output against the chart before it goes on skin.

On a phone the easiest keyboard is Google's Gboard, which added Filipino (Baybayin) together with Hanunó'o, Buhid and Tagbanwa layouts in August 2019: tap a letter, then choose its kudlit or vowel killer. On a computer, tap a letter in the grid above to copy it, or in Microsoft Word type the code and press Alt+X (1700 Alt+X gives ᜀ). The characters have been in Unicode since 2002, with ᜍ ᜟ ᜕ added in version 14.0 (2021), but many systems ship no font for them: if you see boxes, install Noto Sans Tagalog, Noto Sans Hanunoo, Noto Sans Buhid or Noto Sans Tagbanwa, one free font per script, and expect the three 2021 characters to be missing from older fonts.