Filipino Alphabet & Accent Marks

The Alpabetong Filipino, in use since 1987, runs 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. Ñ (enye) is the only character beyond plain A–Z. NG is a letter in its own right, the sound at the end of English 'sing', which Filipino also puts at the start of words: ngayon (now), ngiti (smile). It has no single Unicode character, so it is typed as N followed by G, and dictionaries file it after N and Ñ. When spelling aloud, letters take their English names, except Ñ, called enye, and NG, called en-dyi.

The abakada is the 20-letter alphabet Lope K. Santos introduced in 1940 for the grammar of the national language: A B K D E G H I L M N NG O P R S T U W Y, named a, ba, ka, da and so on. A revised 31-letter alphabet was adopted in 1976, and the 1987 revision had 28 letters. Native words still need only those twenty, which is why it is kotse and sapatos with K and S, from Spanish coche and zapatos. The eight added letters, C F J Ñ Q V X Z, carry names (Rizal's Calamba, Quezon), loanwords kept in their original spelling, and words from other Philippine languages, such as the Ivatan head cover vakul.

Filipino accent marks: pahilís, paiwà and pakupyâ

Filipino words differ by stress and by whether they end in a glottal stop (the catch in the throat in English 'uh-oh'), and the standard orthography has three accent marks, the tuldik, to write it. The pahilís or acute (á) marks stress on the last syllable: bukás (open) against bukas (tomorrow), asó (smoke) against aso (dog). The paiwà or grave (à) marks a final glottal stop on a word stressed on the syllable before: batà (child). The pakupyâ or circumflex (â) marks a stressed last syllable that ends in a glottal stop: walâ (none), sampû (ten), punô (full) against puno (tree). Words stressed on the second-to-last syllable with no glottal stop, the most common kind, get no mark.

Grammar books sort words into four classes by these marks: malumay (no mark), mabilís (pahilís), malumì (paiwà) and maragsâ (pakupyâ). You will see the marks in dictionaries, school textbooks and language lessons, and whenever a writer needs to tell two words apart; in texts, news and social media they are almost always left off and the reader knows the word from context. Spanish accents survive in names, as in José Rizal and Ramón Magsaysay.

Baybayin, the old Filipino script

Before and during early Spanish rule, Tagalogs wrote in baybayin, an abugida of three vowels and fourteen consonants: each consonant carries the vowel a (ᜊ ba, ᜃ ka), a mark above called kudlit turns it to e or i (ᜊᜒ bi), a mark below to o or u (ᜊᜓ bu), and ᜀ ᜁ ᜂ stand alone. D and r shared one letter, ᜇ, and a final consonant was simply not written until Spanish friars introduced the cross-shaped vowel killer ᜔ in the 17th century. The first book printed in the Philippines, the Doctrina Christiana of 1593, gives its Tagalog text in baybayin as well as in Latin letters.

Unicode encodes baybayin in the Tagalog block (U+1700–U+171F). Unicode 14.0 added the modern ᜍ ra, the archaic ᜟ ra and ᜕ pamudpod, an alternative vowel-cancelling mark; the phrase-ending marks ᜵ and ᜶ sit in the neighbouring Hanunó'o block. Fonts such as Noto Sans Tagalog display them. Baybayin is enjoying a revival in tattoos, shirts, logos and street art; the same characters also write Cebuano badlit and the related Ilocano script.

How to type ñ, the accent marks and ₱

Philippine laptops and phones use the ordinary US keyboard, so only ñ, the tuldik vowels and ₱ need a trick. On Windows, hold Alt and type on the number pad: ñ Alt+0241, Ñ Alt+0209; á Alt+0225, à Alt+0224, â Alt+0226 (é 0233, è 0232, ê 0234, í 0237, ì 0236, î 0238, ó 0243, ò 0242, ô 0244, ú 0250, ù 0249, û 0251). On a laptop without a number pad, switch on the US-International layout and type ~ then n for ñ, ' then a vowel for á, ` then a vowel for à, ^ then a vowel for â.

On a Mac, Option+N then n gives ñ, Option+E then a vowel gives the acute, Option+` the grave and Option+I the circumflex. On Android and iPhone keyboards, hold down n or a vowel and slide to the accented form. In HTML, write ñ, á, à and â. The peso sign ₱ (U+20B1) has no key: in Word type 20b1 and press Alt+X, on a phone look among the currency symbols, or copy it from this page; many people simply write P250 or PHP 250.

Filipino vs Tagalog, and where Filipino is spoken

Filipino is the national language of the Philippines under the 1987 Constitution and, with English, one of its two official languages. It is built on Tagalog, the language of Manila and the surrounding provinces, which was chosen as the basis of a national language in 1937 and called Pilipino from 1959. In practice Filipino and Tagalog share grammar and nearly all their words; Filipino is the standardised national form, open to words from other Philippine languages, Spanish and English, and everyday speech in the cities slides freely into Taglish.

CLDR estimates about 73 million speakers: some 71 million in the Philippines 🇵🇭, about 1.4 million in the United States 🇺🇸, 780,000 in Canada 🇨🇦 and 20,000 in Macao 🇲🇴, with large communities of Filipino workers in Hong Kong and the Gulf as well. Its closest relatives are the other Philippine languages (see the Cebuano, Ilocano, Hiligaynon, Waray, Bikol, Kapampangan and Pangasinan collections), and further off Malay and Indonesian, which share words like anak (child), mata (eye) and langit (sky). Three centuries of Spanish rule left hundreds of loanwords, mesa, kutsara, bintana, and the ñ itself: see the Spanish collection.