Buhid Alphabet Table
| Letter | Unicode name | Romanized | Sound |
|---|---|---|---|
| ᝀ | A | a | vowel a |
| ᝁ | I | i · e | vowel i |
| ᝂ | U | u · o | vowel u |
| ᝃ | KA | ka | k |
| ᝄ | GA | ga | g |
| ᝅ | NGA | nga | ng |
| ᝆ | TA | ta | t |
| ᝇ | DA | da · ra | d / r |
| ᝈ | NA | na | n |
| ᝉ | PA | pa | p |
| ᝊ | BA | ba | b |
| ᝋ | MA | ma | m |
| ᝌ | YA | ya | y |
| ᝍ | RA | ra | r |
| ᝎ | LA | la | l |
| ᝏ | WA | wa | w |
| ᝐ | SA | sa | s |
| ᝑ | HA | ha | h |
Buhid is the script of the Buhid Mangyan people of Mindoro island - and like its close cousin Hanunóo, it is still used today by Mangyans to write their language, alongside the Filipino orthography, in a working bilingual literacy that makes Mindoro the one place in the Philippines where pre-colonial scripts never stopped living. The lineage is the family standard: Pallava gave way to Old Kawi in the Indian Ocean trade, and Kawi seeded the Philippine scripts - baybayin, Hanunóo, Buhid, Tagbanwa and Kulitan are all children of that one inheritance. The abugida logic is the family’s too: eighteen letters, each consonant carrying an inherent a, a kudlit mark above flipping the vowel to i/e and below to u/o, and a, i, u as full vowel letters.
What sets Buhid apart is not the machinery but the company it keeps: it is one of only two Philippine scripts (with Hanunóo) passed down in unbroken community use into the present, which makes its letterforms - and the Mangyan practice of carving them - a living bridge to the writing of the archipelago before colonization. Unicode 3.2 (2002) encoded it in the Buhid block (U+1740): 18 letters including a standalone <i>ra</i>, plus the two vowel signs that carry the kudlit work. This chart is verified letter-by-letter against that standard, and it pairs naturally with the <a href="https://tooldune.com/hanunoo-alphabet-table/">Hanunóo</a> and <a href="https://tooldune.com/baybayin-alphabet-table/">Baybayin</a> charts as the third living member of the family.
How to use
- Read the table as the script’s inventory: three vowel letters, then fifteen consonants including the standalone <i>ra</i>. Each consonant says consonant + a until a kudlit mark says otherwise - above the letter for i/e, below for u/o - and the romanized column doubles as your pronunciation key while the Unicode-name column lets you check every glyph against its exact code point. If you already know baybayin or Hanunóo, the shapes will feel like a familiar handwriting drifting apart at the edges: same skeleton, different hand, and the differences are exactly where beginners mix the scripts up.
- To write, spell syllable by syllable: consonant letter, then a kudlit only when the vowel is not a. The da/ra rule is the family’s - one letter historically covered both sounds because the languages hear them as one - but Buhid, unlike its siblings, also carries a separate <i>ra</i> letter (U+174D) for the split, so modern writing can mark the difference where older inscriptions could not. Final consonants follow the same convention as the rest of the family: traditional writing drops them and trusts the reader, and a modern vowel-killer convention can close a syllable when precision matters.
- Practice in the script’s own habitat: short carved-style lines rather than long cursive passages. Buhid writing shares the Mangyan habit of inscription - straight strokes, generous spacing, letters sized for a knife’s wobble on bamboo or wood - so write large and let the geometry stay exact. Compare words across the three living charts (your name, a place name, a common phrase): the exercise teaches the family’s shared logic and each script’s personality at once, and it is the fastest way to keep the three similar inventories from blurring together.
Frequently asked questions
Who are the Buhid Mangyan?
The Buhid are one of the Mangyan peoples of Mindoro island in the Philippines - the island’s eight Mangyan groups include the Hanunóo of the south and the Buhid, whose language and script this chart covers. They are Austronesian speakers, and their island’s relative isolation through the Spanish period is the reason the Philippines’ two living pre-colonial scripts both survive there: the colonial machinery that absorbed Luzon’s writing habits into the Latin alphabet reached the Mangyan highlands lightly enough to leave the local scripts breathing.
Is Buhid still written today?
Yes - the Buhid script is still used today by Mangyans to write the Buhid language, alongside the Filipino orthography: a real bilingual literacy rather than a museum piece. Like Hanunóo it is classed as an endangered but living script - transmission runs through families and community schools rather than mass media, and the number of daily users is small and thinning. But the practical fact stands: children on Mindoro still learn to write in a script their ancestors used before the Spanish arrived, which no other Philippine script community outside Mindoro can say.
How is Buhid different from Hanunoo and Baybayin?
They are three children of one parent - the Old Kawi lineage - so the logic is shared: three vowels, inherent a, kudlit flip, da-that-says-ra. The differences are in the inventory and the hand: Buhid carries eighteen letters including a standalone <i>ra</i> (Baybayin’s block adds an archaic ra at the end of its block instead, and Tagbanwa has none at all); the letterforms themselves drifted like the handwriting of siblings who stopped copying each other. Culturally the split matters more: Hanunóo and Buhid stayed in living community use on Mindoro, while baybayin became a heritage symbol and Tagbanwa the family’s smallest inventory.
What is the Pallava-to-Kawi lineage?
The Indian Ocean’s writing pipeline. Indic Brahmi evolved into the Pallava script of South India; Pallava traveled with Hindu-Buddhist trade to Java, Sumatra and the Malay world, becoming Old Kawi (old Javanese); and Kawi - carried by the same sea routes - seeded the scripts of island Southeast Asia and the Philippines. Every Philippine script in this family descends from that chain, which is why they all share the abugida skeleton: consonant-plus-inherent-a syllable letters, vowel-flipping diacritics, and the three-vowel economy. The same pipeline gave Java and Bali the scripts their manuscripts still use, making the Philippine family the northern branch of a thousand-year-old writing diaspora.
How do the kudlit vowel signs work in Buhid?
Exactly as in the sister scripts: a consonant letter reads consonant + a by default; a mark above the letter switches the vowel to i/e; a mark below, to u/o. In Unicode the two marks are encoded as full characters - Buhid Vowel Sign I (U+1752) and Vowel Sign U (U+1753) - so digital text spells them explicitly where handwriting used a small tick. Three sounds take no mark: the a that is built in, and the pure vowels a, i and u, which have their own letters. That is the entire vowel system: three letters and two marks, covering every syllable a Philippine language needs.