Baybayin Alphabet Table
| Letter | Unicode name | Romanized | Sound |
|---|---|---|---|
| ᜀ | A | a | vowel a |
| ᜁ | I | i · e | vowel i |
| ᜂ | U | u · o | vowel u |
| ᜃ | KA | ka | k |
| ᜄ | GA | ga | g |
| ᜅ | NGA | nga | ng |
| ᜆ | TA | ta | t |
| ᜇ | DA | da · ra | d / r (one letter in old texts) |
| ᜈ | NA | na | n |
| ᜉ | PA | pa | p |
| ᜊ | BA | ba | b |
| ᜋ | MA | ma | m |
| ᜌ | YA | ya | y |
| ᜍ | RA | ra | r (archaic independent form) |
| ᜎ | LA | la | l |
| ᜏ | WA | wa | w |
| ᜐ | SA | sa | s |
| ᜑ | HA | ha | h |
Baybayin is the script Tagalog speakers wrote with before the Spanish arrived - and the script in which the first book ever printed in the Philippines, the 1593 Doctrina Christiana, set its Tagalog text. It belongs to the Indic family of abugidas: seventeen classic letters (three vowels and fourteen consonants, each consonant carrying an inherent a) plus the standalone ra, written with reed or knife and read left to right. Spanish friars learned it, printed in it, and then re-engineered it - adding a cross-shaped virama to fix its one structural quirk, the unmarked final consonant.
Today baybayin lives a double life: a scholarly script you can see in the 1593 woodblock pages and in museum inscriptions, and a living symbol - tattoos, signage, logos, and a revival movement that pushed for its recognition as a national writing system. Unicode 3.2 encoded it in 2002 (the Tagalog block, U+1700), which is what lets this chart, every baybayin web translator, and every baybayin font work from one standard table. Learn the 18 shapes below and you can read all of it - the vowel-flipping kudlit and the modern virama are the only extras on top.
How to use
- Start from the three vowels: a, i/e and u/o are full letters, one each - Philippine languages get along with three vowel qualities, and the i/e and u/o pairs are written the same way. Then take the consonants in families rather than rows: the chart is in Unicode order, but the shapes themselves cluster - ka, ga and nga share an angular skeleton; da, na and pa are curve variants of one another; ba and la mirror each other. Learners who group them this way internalize the 18 shapes in a sitting, and the romanized column doubles as a pronunciation key while the shapes settle into memory.
- To write a word, spell it syllable by syllable: consonant letters say consonant + a unless a kudlit (a dot or short tick) says otherwise - above the letter for i/e, below for u/o. The rule you must know before writing anything real: final consonants are the system’s blind spot - baybayin has no native way to end a syllable on a consonant, so bibingka was written as bi-bi-nga with the final k simply gone, and Spanish friars complained Tagalog texts were hopelessly ambiguous. The 1620 fix - Francisco López’s cross-shaped virama that cancels the inherent vowel - and the native pamudpod mark restore the missing consonant, and modern writing uses both.
- Practice on names and place names first - they are why most people come to baybayin, and they exercise the whole system: your name probably ends in a consonant, so you must choose between the historic convention (drop it) and the modern virama (mark it). Then read the 1593 Doctrina Christiana pages, which survive as facsimiles online: real sixteenth-century woodblock lettering, complete with the era’s spelling habits and its dropped consonants. Write large and slow - the letters were carved, not cursive - and keep the stroke count of each shape exact, because a missing stroke is a different letter.
Frequently asked questions
Is baybayin the same thing as alibata?
No - and the difference matters. Alibata is a twentieth-century coinage (credited to writer Paul Verzosa in the 1920s) built on the mistaken analogy with Arabic alif-bata; it stuck in textbooks for decades. Baybayin is the older, attested name - it comes from baybay, to spell or write syllable by syllable, and it is the term in the earliest Spanish accounts and the one scholars and increasingly official usage prefer. When you see a tattoo or a logo labeled alibata, it is baybayin wearing an outdated name.
Why does baybayin drop final consonants?
Because the script is syllabic by design: every consonant letter is a syllable, consonant + a, and the vowel can be changed - or, once the virama arrives, removed - but there was no symbol to say a syllable ends on its consonant. Pre-colonial Tagalog tolerated this: many native words lost their final consonants in spelling without hurting comprehension, since the reader knew the language. The collision came with foreign words and names - Spanish text rendered in baybayin was famously ambiguous - which is exactly what motivated López’s 1620 cross-shaped virama. So the dropped consonant is not carelessness but a structural feature of abugidas without a vowel-killer.
What is the Doctrina Christiana of 1593?
The first book printed in the Philippines: a woodblock-printed Christian doctrina in Spanish and Tagalog - its full title, Doctrina Christiana en Lengua Española y Tagala - with the Tagalog text set both in the Latin alphabet and in baybayin. It is the earliest surviving printed evidence of the script, which means baybayin was already old enough, mature enough and standardized enough to typeset a book from centuries before printing reached Manila. For chart-makers it has a second value: its letterforms are the reference point for how the script looked at first contact, and this table follows the same canonical letter set.
Where did baybayin come from?
From the same Indian Ocean pipeline as most of Southeast Asia’s scripts: Indic Brahmi begat the Pallava script of South India, Pallava traveled with trade to Java and Sumatra as Kawi, and Kawi - carried by merchants up the island chains - evolved into the Philippine family: baybayin in Luzon, Hanunóo and Buhid in Mindoro, Tagbanwa in Palawan, Kulitan among the Kapampangan. The shared skeleton is visible across the charts: the same three-vowel economy, the same inherent-a logic, the same kudlit device. Baybayin was no mere import - it was localized, renamed and lived in for centuries before any Spanish record - but its deep ancestry is Indian, via the sea lanes that also delivered its sister scripts.
Can I get a baybayin tattoo or use it for a logo?
Yes, and you will be in good company - baybayin is probably the most tattooed script in Southeast Asia. The two failure modes are predictable: wrong letters (an online translator that mishandles final consonants or the da/ra split) and wrong shapes (freehand drawings that drop a stroke and silently change the letter). Use the Unicode-encoded letters as ground truth - the 18 shapes on this chart are exactly the code points U+1700 to U+1711 - decide deliberately on the final-consonant question (drop it, historic-style, or mark it with the virama), and have someone who reads the script check the result before it becomes permanent.