Baybayin (, ), also sometimes erroneously referred to as alibata, is a Philippine script that was widely used in Luzon during and prior to the 16th and 17th centuries. It was utilized primarily to write Tagalog, and to a lesser extent, Visayan languages, Kapampangan, Ilocano, and several other Philippine languages.
Baybayin is an abugida belonging to the family of the Brahmic scripts. Its use was gradually replaced by the Latin alphabet during Spanish rule, though it has seen limited modern usage in the Philippines. The script is encoded in Unicode as Tagalog block since 2002 alongside Buhid, Hanunoo, and Tagbanwa scripts. The Archives of the University of Santo Tomas in Manila holds the largest collection of extant writings using Baybayin.
Baybayin has seen a rise in modern usage, primarily for cultural and artistic purposes, including in visual arts, literature, tattoos, and logos. It is also featured on the logos of government agencies, Philippine banknotes, and passports. Additionally, there are educational initiatives and workshops aimed at teaching Baybayin to a new generation. Social media has also been instrumental in the increased awareness and interest in Baybayin. Artists, educators, and enthusiasts use these platforms to share tutorials, artworks, and historical facts about the script, sparking interest among younger generations. Bills to recognize the script and revive its use alongside the Latin alphabet have been repeatedly considered by the Congress.
Terminology
comes from the Tagalog root word , which means "spelling". The first attested use of the term to refer to a writing system is from the 1613 Tagalog dictionary Vocabulario de la lengua tagala by the Spanish priest Pedro San Buenaventura. There, the word was recorded as . Early Spanish accounts commonly referred to baybayin as “Tagalog letters” or “Tagalog writing.” Additionally, it was referred to as sulat Tagalog by the heads of the communities in the attestation of Pacaen de Mayoboc (1681).
While the Philippine script is most widely known today as baybayin, it is not a single uniform alphabet, but rather a family of closely related regional variants. Because different ethnic groups used the same writing system, it was known by various local names and stylized according to regional languages. For instance, it was called basahan among the Bicolanos, kulitan (or kulit) among the Kapampangan, kurditan (or kur-itan) among the Ilocanos, and badlit among the Visayans. These terms generally refer to the local manner of writing or the characters themselves, rather than entirely separate scripts.
Historically, the term alibata was used synonymously with Baybayin. Alibata is a neologism first coined in 1914, possibly under the false assumption that the script was derived from the Arabic script, hence the name. Most modern scholars reject the use of the word alibata as incorrect.
Characteristics
Letters Baybayin has 17 letters, or in Tagalog. There are 3 vowels, or , and 14 consonants, or . Each consonant is inherently pronounced with a vowel soundspecifically /a/making baybayin an abugida. The phonemes /e/ and /i/ share one character, . The same applies to /o/ and /u/, symbolized by the character ; and /da/ and /ra/, symbolized by the character .
The character , although not in traditional baybayin, is sometimes used to represent /ra/. Purportedly, it originates from the archaic writing system of the Sambal people in Zambales province. The connection was made in 1895 by the Augustinian friar Cipriano Marcilla y Martín, who said that the letter was documented in a 1601 Spanish manuscript. The Dominican friar Evergisto Bazaco wrote that the letter was likely introduced by missionaries instead of being native to the Sambal. Despite this, this character isn't commonly learned and used in any settings.
Diacritics
To change the inherent vowel of a given consonant, a diacritic mark called kudlit is placed either above or below the letter. Placing it above changes the /a/ to an /e/ or /i/, and placing it below changes the /a/ to an /o/ or /u/.
One kudlit, , called sabat or krus, a virama removes a consonant's inherent a vowel, making it an independent consonant. The krus-kudlít virama was added to the original script by the Spanish priest Francisco López in 1620. Later, the pamudpod virama , which has the same function, was added. Besides these phonetic considerations, the script is unicase and does not use letter cases to distinguish proper names or the start of sentences.
+ Vowels and viramas
+ The base characters with all consonant–vowel and virama combinations
Punctuation and spacing Baybayin originally used only one punctuation mark (), which was called Bantasán. Today baybayin uses two punctuation marks, the Philippine single () punctuation, acting as a comma or verse splitter in poetry, and the double punctuation (), acting as a period or end of paragraph. These punctuation marks are similar to single and double danda signs in other Indic abugidas, and may be presented vertically like Indic dandas, or slanted like forward slashes. The signs are unified across the Philippines scripts and were encoded by Unicode in the Hanunóo script block. Space separation of words was historically not used as words were written in a continuous flow, but it is common today after the introduction of other writing systems.
Alphabetical order In the Doctrina Christiana, the letters were ordered without any connection with other similar scripts, except for sorting vowels before consonants as: a, u/o, i/e; ha, pa, ka, sa, la, ta, na, ba, ma, ga, da/ra, ya, nga, wa. In Unicode the letters are ordered in a similar way to other Indic scripts, by phonetic class. a, i/e, o/u; ka, ga, nga; ta, da, na; pa, ba, ma; ya, ra, la; wa, sa, ha.
Way of writing
According to Scott, when the sign for ba has to be read as be / bi, it has a kudlit (a small "v" shaped diacritic sign) on the left (or above), if it has to be read as bu / bo, the kudlit is on the right (resp. below). The ancient characters of Tagalog and Camarines people had its own character for /r/, in contrast to more common modern Baybayin version and Ilokano kurdita. In his time the kaldit was called or according to Marcos de Lisboa, author of the earliest dictionary of Bikol.
According to Lisboa, writing for old Bikolnons started from the bottom up, writing to the right. p. 363. Vocabulario de la lengua bicol. Kinua 10-16-20 However, some scholars such as Ignacio Villamor who have studied the basahan of pre-Hispanic Filipinos strongly emphasize that they all wrote texts in a straight line starting from left to right, then returning to the left at the beginning and keep writing right.Villamor, Ignacio. La Antigua Escritura Filipina.Tip. Pontificia Del Colegio De Sto. Tomas.publ. 1922.
History The precise origins of baybayin are not well-defined. Precolonial evidence of indigenous communication practices is scant because few written records from the time period have survived. This is because cultural and historical information were, instead, generally preserved orally.
Brahmi origins
Despite the writing system's unclear origins, scholars agree that baybayin, like all other abugida scripts of Southeast Asia, ultimately descends from the Brahmi script of ancient India. This was made possible by the indirect Indianization of the Philippines during the archipelago's precolonial period. Various aspects of Indian languages were introduced to the Philippines likely through Indonesia to the south, where writing systems related to baybayinlike the Kawi scriptwere used.
Isaac Taylor sought to show that was introduced into the Philippines from the Coast of Bengal sometime before the 8th century. In attempting to show such a relationship, Taylor presented graphic representations of Kistna and Assam letters like g, k, ng, t, m, h, and u, which resemble the same letters in . Fletcher Gardner argued that the Philippine scripts had "very great similarity" with the Brahmi script, which was supported by T. H. Pardo de Tavera. According to Christopher Miller, evidence seems strong for to be ultimately of Gujarati origin; however, Philippine and Gujarati languages have final consonants, so it is unlikely that their indication would have been dropped had been based directly on a Gujarati model.
Kawi
The Kawi script originated in Java, descending from the Pallava script, and was used across much of Maritime Southeast Asia. The Laguna Copperplate Inscription is the earliest-known written document found in the Philippines. It is a legal document with the inscribed date of Saka Era 822, corresponding in the Proleptic Gregorian Calendar to 21 April 900 AD. It was written in the Kawi script in a variety of Old Malay containing numerous loanwords from Sanskrit and a few non-Malay vocabulary elements whose origin is ambiguous between Old Javanese and Old Tagalog. A second example of Kawi script can be seen on the Butuan Ivory Seal, found in the 1970s and dated between the 9th and 12th centuries. It is an ancient seal made of ivory that was found in an archaeological site in Butuan, inscribed with the word Butwan in stylized Kawi, and now in the National Museum of the Philippines. One hypothesis therefore reasons that, since Kawi is the earliest attestation of writing in the Philippines, then may have descended from Kawi.
South Sulawesi scripts David Diringer, accepting the view that the scripts of the Malay Archipelago originate in India, writes that the South Sulawesi scripts derive from the Kawi script, probably through the medium of the Batak script of Sumatra. The Philippine scripts, according to Diringer, were possibly brought to the Philippines through the Buginese characters in Sulawesi. According to Scott, 's immediate ancestor was very likely a South Sulawesi script, probably Old Makassar or a close ancestor. This is because of the lack of final consonants or vowel canceler markers in . South Sulawesi languages have a restricted inventory of syllable-final consonants and do not represent them in the Bugis and Makassar scripts. The most likely explanation for the absence of final consonant markers in is therefore that its direct ancestor was a South Sulawesi script. Sulawesi lies directly to the south of the Philippines and there is evidence of trade routes between the two. must therefore have been developed in the Philippines in the fifteenth century CE as the Bugis-Makassar script was developed in South Sulawesi no earlier than 1400 CE.
Cham script
could have been introduced to the Philippines by maritime connections with the Champa Kingdom. Geoff Wade has argued that the characters "ga", "nga", "pa", "ma", "ya", and "sa" display characteristics that can be best explained by linking them to the Cham script, rather than other Indic abugidas. According to Wade, seems to be more related to other Southeast Asian scripts than to the Kawi script. Wade argues that the Laguna Copperplate Inscription is not definitive proof for a Kawi origin of , as the inscription displays final consonants, which does not.
Early history