Waray Alphabet & Letters

Waray, also called Waray-Waray, Winaray or Lineyte-Samarnon, 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, the sound at the end of English 'sing', and it begins common words such as ngaran (name) and nga, the little word that links a describing word to its noun, as in maupay nga aga (good morning). 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 Waray 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, such as the provinces of Samar and the city of Calbayog, while native words are spelled with K: kaon (eat), kulop (afternoon).

Waray spelling: Ñ, hyphens and the vowels

Ñ (enye) is the only letter beyond plain A–Z. In Waray country it is most at home in church and at the fiesta: Tacloban's patron is the Señor Santo Niño, and Spanish-derived names such as Niño, Peña and Muñoz keep it too. Typed without the tilde, Señor reads as Se-nor, so it is worth copying the real ñ.

Waray spelling is close to phonetic, one letter per sound. Most Waray varieties have three main vowel sounds, a, i and u, while eastern Samar varieties also have a fourth central vowel, written ë. The official orthography uses five vowel letters, A, E, I, O and U, with rules for distinguishing E from I and O from U in spelling. Accent marks are often omitted in everyday writing, but the official orthography uses them when needed to mark stress or glottal stops, and uses ë for the regional central vowel. The glottal stop (the catch in the throat in English 'uh-oh') is shown with a hyphen when it follows a consonant: gab-i (night, evening), bag-o (new). The same hyphen keeps a prefix off a root that starts with a vowel, as in Mag-amping ka (take care).

Badlit, the old Visayan script

Before Spanish rule the people of Samar and Leyte wrote in their form of the Philippine script family best known by its Tagalog name, baybayin; in the Visayas it is called badlit. The Jesuit Francisco Ignacio Alcina, who spent decades in Samar and Leyte, described the islanders' writing in his 1668 history of 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. The old scripts wrote d and r with one letter, ᜇ. The cross-shaped vowel killer ᜔, introduced by Spanish friars, 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 Waray word in the old script is typed with the same characters as baybayin, and fonts such as Noto Sans Tagalog show them.

How to type ñ, ₱ and Waray words

Philippine computers and phones use the ordinary US keyboard, so everything in Waray 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.

Waray language: where it is spoken, and Waray vs Bisaya

Waray is spoken across most of Samar (Northern Samar, Samar and Eastern Samar), the eastern part of Biliran, and northern and eastern Leyte, with Tacloban, Calbayog, Catbalogan and Borongan among its cities; western and southern Leyte speak Cebuano. CLDR estimates about 3.4 million speakers, and many more Waray families live in Manila, Mindanao and abroad. Many speakers also use Filipino and English, and in 2012 Waray was among the first languages of the Philippine mother-tongue programme for the early school grades.

Is Waray a language or a dialect? Linguists count it as a language of its own, in the Visayan branch of the Central Philippine languages, beside Cebuano and Hiligaynon; Tagalog and Bikol are further relatives (see the Cebuano, Hiligaynon, Filipino and Bikol collections). The alphabet is shared, but everyday words differ: good is maupay in Waray, maayo in Cebuano and mabuti in Tagalog; no is diri against Cebuano dili and Tagalog hindi; many is damo against daghan. The language's own name comes from waray, 'none, nothing', the word Cebuano and Tagalog say as wala. Across the country the name is also known from the popular song 'Waray-Waray' 🎶, which praises the fearless people of Samar and Leyte.