Kapampangan Alphabet & Accent Marks

Kapampangan, the language of Pampanga, is written in Latin letters, and schools teach it with the same 28-letter alphabet 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. Ñ is the only character beyond plain A–Z, kept in Spanish names and loanwords such as Santo Niño. NG is a letter in its own right, the sound at the end of English 'sing', heard in the name Kapampangan itself and in mangan (to eat); it has no single Unicode character, so it is typed as N followed by G. Native words need only part of the alphabet; C, F, J, Q, V, X and Z turn up mostly in names and borrowed words.

Kapampangan has five vowels, a e i o u, and many of its e's and o's grew out of the old diphthongs ay and aw that its neighbours kept: a house is bale in Kapampangan but balay in Cebuano. Spelling has two traditions. Spanish friars wrote the language with C and QU in their grammars and dictionaries from the 17th and 18th centuries, which is where Capampangan comes from; the 20th century brought the K and W of the Tagalog-based abakada, which gives Kapampangan. Both are still in use, so you will meet both spellings.

Kapampangan accent marks: stress and the glottal stop

Like Tagalog, Kapampangan tells some words apart by which syllable is stressed and by whether a word ends in a glottal stop, the catch in the throat in English 'uh-oh'. Dictionaries, grammars and careful writers show this with three marks: in the KWF Kapampangan orthography, acute á marks stress or vowel length and may fall on the penultimate or final syllable; grave à marks penultimate stress with a final glottal stop; circumflex â marks final stress with a final glottal stop. The grid lines the marks up on all five vowels.

In texts, signs, songs and social media the marks are usually left off, and readers know the word from context. You will mostly need them for school work, language lessons and dictionary-style spellings, and in Spanish-origin names such as José and Ramón.

Kulitan, the old Kapampangan script

Before the Spanish brought the Latin alphabet, Kapampangans wrote in a baybayin-type script of their own. The modern Kapampangan script, Kulitan, grew out of that tradition: its main letters are called indung sulat, 'mother letters', and small marks called anak sulat, 'child letters', change their vowel. Kulitan is traditionally written in vertical columns from top to bottom, with the letters of a syllable stacked into one cluster, so it looks quite different from baybayin even where the letters are related.

Kulitan has been revived since the late 20th century by Kapampangan cultural groups and promoted by places such as the Center for Kapampangan Studies at Holy Angel University in Angeles City; you see it on logos, signs, shirts, murals and tattoos. Kulitan has no dedicated Unicode characters, so it cannot be copied and pasted as portable Kulitan text: online it travels as images or in special fonts that draw Kulitan shapes over ordinary Latin letters, and text written that way turns back into Latin letters wherever the font is missing. That is why this page has no Kulitan characters. Baybayin letters such as ᜊ are Unicode characters, but they belong to a different script and are not a substitute for Kulitan.

How to type ñ, the accent marks and ₱

Kapampangan is typed on the ordinary US keyboard, so only ñ, the accented 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, and ^ 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 of its own: in Word type 20b1 and press Alt+X, on a phone look among the currency symbols, or copy it from this page.

Where Kapampangan is spoken: a language, not a dialect

CLDR estimates about 2.7 million speakers of Kapampangan, nearly all in the Philippines 🇵🇭: across Pampanga (including San Fernando and Angeles City, which is politically independent of the province), southern Tarlac, and neighbouring parts of Central Luzon. The name comes from pampang, riverbank: the Kapampangan are the people of the banks of the Pampanga River.

Kapampangan is often called a dialect, but it is a language of its own: a Tagalog speaker cannot follow it without learning it. Its closest relatives are the Sambal languages of Zambales; further off it is related to the other Philippine languages (see the Filipino, Ilocano, Cebuano and Pangasinan collections) and to Malay. Most Kapampangans also speak Filipino and English, and three centuries of Spanish rule left loanwords such as Pasku, Christmas (see the Spanish collection).

Pampanga in emoji

Pampanga is known as the Culinary Capital of the Philippines, and Kapampangan food is the first thing people post: 🐖🌶️🍋 for sisig, the sizzling chopped-pork dish popularised in Angeles City by Lucia Cunanan, 'Aling Lucing', seasoned with chili and calamansi; 🍚 for rice and the sweet cured pork called tocino; and 🐸 and 🦗 for the province's bolder dishes, betute (stuffed frog) and camaru (fried mole crickets), usually with 😋 and the word manyaman, delicious.

In December, the City of San Fernando holds the Giant Lantern Festival, and the star-shaped parols that earned it the name Christmas Capital of the Philippines are posted as 🌟⭐✨🎄. Holy Week brings ⛪✝️🙏, the volcano 🌋 stands for Mount Pinatubo, whose 1991 eruption triggered lahar flows that buried much of Bacolor in 1995, ⛰️ for Mount Arayat, 🌾 for the rice plains and ✈️ for Clark. 💍🎶 is Atin Ku Pung Singsing, the best-known Kapampangan folk song, about a lost ring.