Baybayin (, baɪˈbajɪn; also formerly known as alibata) is a Philippine script. The script is an abugida belonging to the family of the Brahmic scripts. Geographically, it was widely used in Luzon and other parts of the Philippines prior to and during the 16th and 17th centuries before being replaced by the Latin alphabet during the period of Spanish colonization. It was used in the Tagalog language and, to a lesser extent, Kapampangan-speaking areas; its use spread to the Ilocanos in the early 17th century. In the 19th and 20th centuries, baybayin survived and evolved into multiple forms—the Tagbanwa script of Palawan, and the Hanuno'o and Buhid scripts of Mindoro—and was used to create the constructed modern Kulitan script of the Kapampangan and the Ibalnan script of the Palawan people. Under the Unicode Standard and ISO 15924, the script is encoded as the Tagalog block.
The Archives of the University of Santo Tomas in Manila, one of the largest archives in the Philippines, currently possesses the world's biggest collection of ancient writings in baybayin. The chambers which house the writings are part of a tentative nomination to UNESCO World Heritage List that is still being deliberated on, along with the entire campus of the University of Santo Tomas.
Despite being primarily a historic script, the baybayin script has seen some revival in the modern Philippines. It is often used in the insignia of government agencies and books are frequently published either partially or fully, in baybayin. Bills to require its use in certain cases and instruction in schools have been repeatedly considered by the Congress of the Philippines.
For modern computers and typing, characters are in the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) and were first proposed for encoding in 1998 by Michael Everson together with three other known indigenous scripts of the Philippines.
The term baybayín means "to write" or "to spell (syllabize)" in Tagalog. The entry for "ABC's" (i.e., the alphabet) in San Buenaventura's Vocabulary of the Tagalog language (1613) was translated as baibayin (".
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The Tagalog people (mga Tagalog) are the largest ethnolinguistic group in the Philippines. An Austronesian people, the Tagalogs are native to the Metro Manila and Calabarzon regions of southern Luzon, and comprise the majority in the provinces of Bulacan, Bataan, Nueva Ecija and Aurora in Central Luzon and in the islands of Marinduque and Mindoro in Mimaropa. The commonly perpetuated origin for the endonym "Tagalog" is the term tagá-ilog, which means "people from [along] the river" (the prefix tagá- meaning "coming from" or "native of").
The Austronesian peoples, sometimes referred to as Austronesian-speaking peoples, are a large group of peoples in Taiwan, Malay Peninsula, parts of Mainland Southeast Asia, Maritime Southeast Asia, Micronesia, coastal New Guinea, Island Melanesia, Polynesia, and Madagascar that speak Austronesian languages. They also include indigenous ethnic minorities in Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand, Hainan, the Comoros, and the Torres Strait Islands.
The Ilocanos (Tattao nga Iloko/Ilokano), Ilokanos, or Iloko people are the third largest Filipino ethnolinguistic group. They mostly reside within the Ilocos Region, in the northwestern seaboard of Luzon, Philippines. The native language of the Ilocano people is the Ilocano (or Ilokano) language. Historically, Ilocanos have an elaborate network of beliefs and social practices. The Ilocano diaspora spans nearly all parts of the Philippines, as well as places in the Western world, particularly Hawaii and California.