Modern Baybayin, anyone?

Baybayin has seen a resurgence in popularity lately, and for reasons that are unclear. Perhaps the popularity of Kdramas and animé has made us suddenly envious of our Asian neighbors who do not use boring Latin-based alphabets.

There’s a problem though. Baybayin, being a pre-Hispanic writing system, is completely unfit to write modern Filipino. I believe that if we want to sustain the popularity of Baybayin it has to be modified into something functional. This has been done before by some Baybayin fans, some even adding the equivalent of phonetically redundant English letters such as C and Q. I personally don’t think this is the right way to extend Baybayin since it has existed independently from any Latin-based alphabet.


I did however, find a nice modification of Baybayin from someone who is probably its biggest fan. His modification is the one I find most linguistically sound and a complete chart of his script can be found in his blog nordenx.blogspot.com and in his paper “Saving Endangered Native Philippine Scripts in a Modern Digital World through Typography, Technology, and Standardization,” a pdf copy of which can be downloaded through Google. I am posting a screenshot of his chart below:

As you can see, notable features are the addition of missing phonemes and distinction between e/i and o/u sounds. The script can br downloaded as a font in Windows 10. I don’t know the situation is for iOS but in Android, only the Doctrina Cristiana-based Baybayin are available. I hope somebody who can create Android apps can create such an app.

My other suggestion is to make this modified Baybayin suitable for handwriting. Perhaps a simplified, handwritten version can be made which is less, uhm, squiggly and contains fewer strokes, possibly something that looks as follows:

I really wish more people can be made aware that this form modern Baybayin exists. Traditionalists and purists will hate the idea of a modern Baybayin, but forcing the old script to write Filipino is futile and will most likely make the recent popularity of Baybayin shortlived.