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.
