How it began
Baybayin is the script Filipinos used before Spanish rule. Early 17th-century dictionaries define it as the A-B-C of the Tagalogs, and it was used in Tagalog and Kapampangan speaking areas of Luzon. It belongs to the Brahmic family of scripts. Its beginnings are undated: a Spanish account quoted by Wikipedia says the Tagalogs learned their characters from Borneans who traded at Manila and that the Visayans learned them from the Tagalogs. The earliest example that survives is the Doctrina Christiana printed in 1593, with Tagalog text in both Baybayin and Latin letters.
How it works
Baybayin is an abugida, in which a character stands for a consonant followed by a vowel. It was traditionally written on palm leaves with a sharp stylus or on bamboo with a small knife. The curved letter shapes reflect that practice, since straight lines would tear the leaves, and letters cut into bamboo were wiped with ash to make them stand out. The script had no way to write a consonant at the end of a syllable. In 1620 Francisco Lopez introduced a cross-shaped mark to cancel the vowel, but native writers did not adopt it.
Who pushed back
Under Spanish rule the Latin alphabet gradually replaced Baybayin. The script was still reported in use in Batangas and Laguna in 1703, but a grammar of 1745 remarked that it was already rare to find anyone who could read the Tagalog characters and rarer still to find anyone who could write them, since everyone read and wrote in Spanish letters.
What changed first
The Spanish priest Pedro Chirino in 1604 and Antonio de Morga in 1609 reported that most Filipinos knew the script, and that it served for personal writings and poetry. Two deeds of sale of land from 1613 and 1625, kept at the University of Santo Tomas, are the only known documents on paper written wholly in Baybayin. The university's archivist notes that they show wider use than once thought and that women took part in buying and selling land.
Where it stands today
Baybayin has seen limited modern use in the Philippines, and bills to recognize the script and revive it alongside the Latin alphabet have been considered repeatedly by Congress. The two University of Santo Tomas documents were declared National Cultural Treasures by the National Archives of the Philippines on August 22, 2014. The university notes that the name alibata, sometimes applied to the script, was invented in 1914 and is incorrect.
