Bikol Alphabet & Basahan Script

Bikol (also spelled Bicol; its speakers say Bikolano or Bikolnon) is written in the Latin alphabet in the same order as Filipino: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N Ñ NG O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z. NG is one letter in this alphabet, the sound at the end of English 'sing', and it begins many words, as in ngaran (name). It has no single character of its own, so it is typed as N followed by G, and dictionaries file it after N and Ñ.

In the common Naga/Legazpi spelling, native words use the twenty indigenous letters of the abakada set A B K D E G H I L M N NG O P R S T U W Y. C, F, J, Ñ, Q, V, X and Z come in with names, loanwords and Spanish-era spellings, which is why the region is still officially the Bicol Region with a C, and why its places are written Camarines, Catanduanes and Legazpi.

Ñ, o and u: what to know about Bikol spelling

Ñ (enye) is the only letter of the alphabet that is not plain A–Z, and Bikolanos write it every September: the region's great feast honours Our Lady of Peñafrancia in Naga City. It also turns up in Spanish-derived names such as Niño and Señor. Without the tilde Peñafrancia would read as Pen-afrancia, so it is worth copying the real ñ.

Naga/Legazpi Bikol spelling is generally sound-based, with k rather than c in native words; ng is a two-letter spelling for one sound. In native vocabulary o and u, and to a lesser degree e and i, are not strictly kept apart, which is why some words are written with either letter. Oragon is the word Bikolanos use with pride for someone bold and fearless. Rinkonada's KWF orthography uses diacritics for stress and length, glottal stops and schwa. Where a prefix ending in a consonant meets a root that starts with a vowel, a hyphen keeps them apart and shows the glottal stop: mag-adal (to study).

Basahan, the old Bikol script

Before Spanish rule Bikolanos wrote in Basahan, their form of the Philippine script family best known by its Tagalog name, baybayin. Each letter is a consonant with the vowel a (ᜊ ba, ᜃ ka); a mark above changes the vowel to e or i (ᜊᜒ bi), a mark below to o or u (ᜊᜓ bu), and the three vowels ᜀ ᜁ ᜂ stand alone. The old scripts wrote d and r with one letter, ᜇ. The cross-shaped vowel killer ᜔, which the Spanish friars introduced, lets modern writers spell a bare consonant.

Unicode encodes Basahan in the Tagalog block (U+1700–U+171F), while the generic Philippine punctuation marks ᜵ (U+1735) and ᜶ (U+1736) are encoded separately in the Hanunoo block; a Basahan inscription is typed with the same script characters as baybayin, and fonts such as Noto Sans Tagalog show them. Old Basahan handwriting had shapes of its own, but the letters and the way they work are the same, so one set of characters serves both.

How to type ñ, ₱ and Bikol words

Philippine computers and phones use the ordinary US keyboard, so everything in Bikol except ñ and ₱ is already on it. On Windows, hold Alt and type on the number pad: ñ Alt+0241 (or Alt+164), Ñ Alt+0209 (or Alt+165). With the US-International layout, type ~ then n. On a Mac, press Option+N, then n (Shift+N for Ñ). On Android and iPhone keyboards, hold down n and slide to ñ. In HTML, write ñ and Ñ.

The peso sign ₱ (U+20B1) has no key: on Windows type 20b1 and press Alt+X in Word, on a phone look in the currency symbols of the keyboard, or copy it from this page. Many Bikolanos simply write P or PHP before the amount, as in ₱250 or P250.

Where Bikol is spoken, and Bikol vs Tagalog

Bikol is the language of the Bicol Region at the south-eastern end of Luzon in the Philippines 🇵🇭: Camarines Norte, Camarines Sur, Albay, Sorsogon, Catanduanes and Masbate. CLDR estimates about 3.5 million speakers; Bikol is really a small family of related varieties, with Central Bikol, the speech of Naga and Legazpi, used in print, on radio and in church, and others such as Rinconada and Albay Bikol spoken around them. Many speakers also use Filipino and English.

Bikol belongs to the Central Philippine languages, so its closest relatives are Tagalog and the Visayan languages: see the Filipino, Cebuano, Hiligaynon and Waray collections. The alphabets are the same, but the words often differ: Tagalog salamat is Bikol Dios mabalos (thank you, literally 'God will repay'), Tagalog araw is aldaw (day), and maganda is magayon (beautiful). Spanish left loanwords and the Spanish collection's ñ, as did English.