When the Spaniards arrived here in Luzon in 1570, the Tagalogs had an indigenous script called baybayin.

According to the 1590 Boxer Codex which is the best description of Tagalog literacy:

“They have certain characters which serve them as letters with which they write whatever they wish.  They are of very different shape from any others we have known until now.  The women commonly know how to write with them, and when they write, it is on some tablets made of the bamboos which they have in those islands, on the bark.  In using such a tablet, which is four fingers wide, they do not write with ink, but with some scribers with which they cut the surface and bark of the bamboo, and make the letters.  They have neither books nor histories nor do they write anything of any length but only letters and reminders to one another.”

William Henry Scott noted that baybayin is one of about a dozen indigenous alphabets from such Southeast Asian islands as Sumatra, Java, and Sulawesi, which are ultimately derived from ancient India, and share the Sanskrit characteristic that any consonant is pronounced with the vowel a following it, diacritical marks are added to express other vowels.  However, baybayin lacks vowel killer or Sanskrit virama needed to cancel the vowel value of a letter and permit it to stand as a consonant alone similar to the Buginese-Makassarese alphabet of Sulawesi and as such was suggested as the intermediate source of the baybayin.

The use of the indigenous scripts here in the Philippines was lost during the Spanish period except in Mindoro and Palawan were the Mangyan and Tagbanwa still continue to use their very own script.  There were several reasons suggested by historians on why the Tagalog script was lost.  According to the article of Paul Morrow “It is more likely that mere practicality was the main reason that the baybayin went out of style. Although it was adequate for the relatively light requirements of pre-Hispanic writing, it could not bear the burdens of the new sounds from the Spanish language and that culture's demand for an accurate written representation of the spoken word.”  In the article written by Hector Santos, he wrote “that the rapid acquisition of literacy in the Latin script with its concomitant social and material benefits, and the disruption of traditional family activities were the main culprits for the loss of the Tagalog script.”

All is not lost for the Tagalogs though.  Filipinos are amazing users of text messaging and as such has been dubbed the “Texting Capital of the World”.  After four hundred years, Tagalogs are still sending short messages, letters or reminders to one another not with baybayin on bamboo tablets but with the Romanized SMS text messaging.  The use is still the same but the medium is different.  (Modern historians will agree that Filipinos are still not fond of writing history). The striking similarity of use of the baybayin as described in the Boxer Codex and our current application of the MMS cellular phone service can now be capitalized by groups who want to teach young tech-savvy Tagalogs make use of the cumbersome baybayin script.  Modern cellular phone today can be programmed to send and receive documents and graphics thus making it easy for individuals to use baybayin.  We can now create documents using our favorite word processor with baybayin fonts installed.

The need to revive and teach young Tagalogs with  the use of the baybayin is one of the projects of the Pila Historical Foundation Inc and other groups like the Mangyan Heritage Center. The Foundation aims to put the town of Pila in the forefront of baybayin research and use development.

As a start, this article will teach folks bring into life baybayin using their favorite word processor, spreadsheet, presentation programs or browsers.  The baybayin fonts can now be downloaded for free.  Just follow this link to download, then unzip and install using this help file.  The downloaded file contains the font file and instruction on how to add baybayin in your very own word processor font list.  For individuals using lower version of Windows please download this unzip software.

After you have downloaded and installed font file you can now start using the baybayin with the help of this tutorial.

The first book printed in the Philippines, the Doctrina Christiana en lengua Español y Tagala written by the Father Juan de Plasencia (first Catholic priest of Pila) and published in 1593 can now be downloaded, viewed or even printed.

For those individuals who want to have their own baybayin font like the San Buenventura’s baybayin variant can download or buy font editors. (San Buenaventura’s baybayin was placed at the beginning of each alphabetic division of the 1613 Vocabulario de Lengua Tagala which was printed in Pila, Laguna by Tomas Pinpin, the first Filipino printer and Partriarch of Filipino printers).  There are several font creator programs you can download like Snapshot, Fontifier or FontLab.

The baybayin use advocacy of the Pila Historical Foundation Inc led to the sponsorship of a baybayin seminar within 2005.  Interested parties may send an e-mail to the group.

The current popularity of the MMS text messaging or other Internet services like e-mail and improvement in the capabilities of computers may one day revive an old Tagalog cultural practice.