“LL” stood for an “elye” sound for Spanish words, like c aballo (horse) or relleno (stuffed), while ÑG represented an “enye-ge” sound, found in names like Zuñga. Eventually, the number of letters in the alphabet used In the islands, called the abecedario, reached 32 letters:

RR appeared in Spanish words like barricada (barricade).īeginning in the 17 th Century, colonized Filipinos followed the Spanish alphabet and its developments. The alphabet, as it appears in the Doctrina, consist of the following: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, IJ, L, M, N, O, P, Q, RR, S, T, U, V, X, Y, and Z The Doctrina does not begin with prayers but with a short instruction in the Latin alphabet, a syllabary, and its counterparts in the Tagalog baybayin script. The book outlines the basic beliefs of Christianity and Christian prayers in the Spanish using the Latin alphabet first, then translated into Tagalog in both baybayin and in the Latin alphabet. Spanish missionaries, who served as the first teachers in the islands, taught converted Filipinos Catholicism, the Latin alphabet, and the Spanish language.Īn evidence of this was the Doctrina Christiana, which was published in Tagalog and Spanish. With colonization under Spain came the Latin alphabet and the decline and eventual disuse of baybayin. Sometime in the 13 th century, writing systems derived from the Indian-influenced cultures of Indonesia and Malaysia came to the islands, leading to the emergence of native writing systems called baybayin, primarily used by certain inhabitants of Luzon and the Visayas.īaybayin is an alpha-syllabic script, meaning certain characters in baybayin can stand for either a single consonant or vowel, while some characters stand for an entire syllable.Īccording to Antonio de Morga’s Events in the Philippine Islands (1609), and the Doctrina Christiana, a catechism and one of the first books ever printed in the Philippines (1593), baybayin had 3 alphabet characters representing vowels (A, E/I, and O/U), while there were 14 characters representing syllables that begin with the consonants (B, C/K, D/R, G, H, L, M, N, NG, P, S, T, W, and Y). Early in the pre-colonial period, the ancient peoples of the Philippines did not have any writing system, and so they relied on oral tradition in recording folklore and folk history.

Abakada alphabet