Kinaray-a Alphabet & Words

Kinaray-a, the language of the Karay-a people of Antique and the uplands of Panay, 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 here, the sound at the end of English 'sing', and it can begin a word, as in ngaran (name). It has no character of its own, so it is typed as N followed by G and filed after N and Ñ.

Native Kinaray-a 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. C, F, J, Ñ, Q, V, X and Z come in with names, loanwords and Spanish-era spellings, which is why the province is still spelled Antique, a Spanish rendering of the older name Hantik, while a native word written today, like kamusta, uses K. Ñ (enye) is the only extra character beyond plain A–Z: it lives on in Spanish names such as Niño and family names with -ño, and in words such as señora; without the tilde they lose a sound, so it is worth copying the real ñ.

Kinaray-a spelling: the hyphen in Kinaray-a and the sixth vowel

The language's own name shows the one mark that does real work. Between a consonant and a vowel, a hyphen marks a glottal stop, the catch in the throat in English 'uh-oh': Kinaray-a is said ki-na-ray-a with a short break before the last a. The same hyphen sits in Antique place names, the towns of Anini-y and Laua-an and Mount Madja-as, and in everyday words such as gab-i (evening). Stress is not marked in ordinary writing; the reader is expected to know the word.

What sets Kinaray-a apart from Hiligaynon in sound is a sixth vowel, a central vowel said between i and u that linguists write as ɨ or ə. Hiligaynon and Filipino have no such vowel; the KWF-recommended orthography writes it as ë.

Kinaray-a vs Hiligaynon

Kinaray-a and Hiligaynon share the island of Panay, the alphabet and a great deal of vocabulary, and most Karay-a also speak Hiligaynon, but they are separate languages. Linguists place Kinaray-a in the Western branch of the Visayan languages, together with Aklanon, while Hiligaynon, Cebuano and Waray belong to the Central branch (see the Hiligaynon, Capiznon, Cebuano and Filipino collections).

The difference a listener notices first is r where Hiligaynon has l: Hiligaynon wala (none, nothing) is Kinaray-a wara, and the people's name itself, Karay-a, is usually traced to iraya, the upland or upstream side, where Hiligaynon says ilaya. Common words differ too: good is Hiligaynon maayo but Kinaray-a mayad, so good morning is Maayong aga in Iloilo City and Mayad nga aga in Antique, and you is kaw, as in Kamusta kaw? and Palangga ta kaw (I love you).

The old Visayan script

Before Spanish rule the Visayans wrote in a script of the baybayin family, called badlit in the Visayas. 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. D and r share one letter, ᜇ. The cross-shaped vowel killer ᜔ lets modern writers spell a bare consonant.

Unicode encodes these letters in the Tagalog block (U+1700–U+171F), with the punctuation marks ᜵ and ᜶ in the neighbouring Hanunó'o block, so a Kinaray-a word in the old script is typed with the same characters as Hiligaynon or Tagalog baybayin. Fonts such as Noto Sans Tagalog show them.

How to type ñ and ₱ for Kinaray-a

Philippine computers and phones use the ordinary US keyboard, so everything in Kinaray-a 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: in Word on Windows type 20b1 and press Alt+X, 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.

Where Kinaray-a is spoken: language or dialect?

Kinaray-a is the home language of Antique, on the western coast of Panay, and of the western and southern upland towns of Iloilo province; it is also heard elsewhere on Panay, and settlers from Panay took it to Mindanao. CLDR estimates about 460,000 speakers in the Philippines 🇵🇭; other counts differ, and many speakers also use Hiligaynon, Filipino and English.

In the Philippines it is often called a dialect, but Kinaray-a is a language of its own, not a variety of Hiligaynon or Tagalog. In 2013 it was added to the languages the Department of Education chose for mother-tongue teaching in the first school grades, and it has a lively written literature of poems, stories and plays by Antiqueño writers.