Cebuano (Bisaya) Alphabet & Badlit

Cebuano, which its speakers usually call Bisaya or Binisaya, 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 everyday words such as ngalan (name) and nganong (why). 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.

Native Cebuano words need only twenty of those letters, the old abakada set A B K D E G H I L M N NG O P R S T U W Y. CLDR's Cebuano main-letter list has 19 entries and does not list NG separately. C, F, J, Ñ, Q, V, X and Z come in with names, loanwords and Spanish-era spellings: the island and city are Cebu with a C, while the old native name is Sugbo, and a native word like kaon (eat) is always spelled with K.

Bisaya spelling: Ñ, hyphens and the vowels

Ñ (enye) is the only single-character addition beyond plain A–Z (NG is also counted as a letter but written with two characters), and in Cebu it is everywhere in January: the crowds of the Sinulog festival shout Pit Señor! to the Santo Niño, but the declared patroness of Cebu is Our Lady of Guadalupe de Cebu. It also appears in Spanish-derived names such as Niño, Peña and Muñoz. Typed without the tilde, Señor reads as Se-nor, so it is worth copying the real ñ.

Cebuano spelling usually reflects pronunciation, though spellings vary. The language has three canonical vowel sounds, a, i and u; /i/ may be spelled i or e, and /u/ u or o. The greeting kumusta also appears as kamusta. Accent marks are not used in ordinary writing; stress is rarely marked. Hyphens are used inconsistently: they can mark a glottal stop, as in bag-o (new), or separate a prefix from a vowel-initial root, as in pag-ampo (prayer); glottal stops may also be left unmarked.

Badlit, the old Bisaya script

Spanish accounts from the late 1500s onward record Visayans using a form of the Philippine script family best known by its Tagalog name, baybayin; in Cebuano it is called badlit (older sources also say surat Bisaya), and enthusiasts are reviving it today in fonts, videos, art and tattoo designs. 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 Spanish friars introduced, lets modern writers spell a bare consonant.

Unicode encodes badlit in the Tagalog block (U+1700–U+171F), and the two Philippine punctuation marks ᜵ and ᜶ that end phrases and sentences sit in the neighbouring Hanunó'o block, so a badlit sign is typed with the same characters as baybayin, and fonts such as Noto Sans Tagalog show them. Letter shapes varied by region and over time, but the letters and the way they work are the same, so one set of characters serves both.

How to type ñ, ₱ and Cebuano words

Philippine computers and phones use the ordinary US keyboard, so everything in Cebuano 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 people simply write P or PHP before the amount, as in ₱250 or P250.

Where Cebuano is spoken, and Bisaya vs Tagalog

Cebuano is the language of Cebu, Bohol, Siquijor and eastern Negros, of parts of Leyte and Masbate, and of much of Mindanao, from Cagayan de Oro to Davao, where settlers from the Visayas made it the common language. CLDR estimates about 28 million speakers, which makes it the most widely spoken native language of the Philippines 🇵🇭 after Tagalog. Boholano and Davao Cebuano are well-known regional varieties, and many speakers also use Filipino and English.

Cebuano belongs to the Visayan branch of the Central Philippine languages; its closest relatives are Hiligaynon and Waray, and beyond them Tagalog and Bikol: see the Hiligaynon, Waray, Filipino and Bikol collections. The alphabet is the same, but the words often differ: Cebuano maanyag or gwapa (beautiful) is Tagalog maganda, dili (no) is hindi, lami (delicious) is masarap, and Gihigugma tika (I love you) is Mahal kita. Both say salamat for thank you. Spanish left many loanwords, which is where the Spanish collection's ñ comes in.