Over the centuries, our language has been evolving and changing - from assimilating Spanish vocabulary into Tagalog, to the modernization of it to “Taglish” like how the Gen-Zs speak in today’s TFCs teleseryes. But, in part of rediscovering where we came from and defining our identity is decolonizing our roots. As we peel back the skins of the onion to find the core, we discover baybayin - an ancient and almost dead Philippine script.
What is baybayin? According to Narra Studio, it’s a an alphasyllabary (also known as an abugida) which is a writing system in which each character consists of a consonant base and a vowel notation, forming a vowel sound (below is a diagram offering examples). However beautiful and important the script is, its relevance today is questioned since no one writes this script anymore - much like latin, it is a dead language. But it’s not completely extinct.
Why did this ancient writing system go away? Why don’t modern Filipinos use it anymore? I sat down with Mark Libatique, whom I found at the Lumpia Festival several months ago as a vendor selling custom baybayin prints as BaybayinTK in black and gold ink. He created beautiful prints for me and my friend, Adie (shoutout to my girl!).
Mark currently works at the Tenement Museum but has done previous non-profit work through New York Immigration Coalition, where he’s work with numerous Filipino organizations including Pilipino-American Unity for Progress (UniPro), where he is now one of the Board of Directors and program director. How he came around to creating prints started from his non-profit work: “I love linguistics and so there’s this specific workshop I would give around language, like Philippine linguistics through the centuries.”
And his love and passion for linguistics is apparent in the way he talked about his obsession with Lord of the Rings and the Tolkien languages and learning Arabic because he found it beautiful. He told me he had started learning baybayin as a kid and wanted to practice the script on his own. Wanting to learn more about his heritage, he was “doing [himself] a favor” by learning how his ancestors communicated before the Philippines was colonized - reconnecting with his roots.
In its history, there’s a degree of empowerment and reclamation to knowing baybayin. “In Latin America, the Spanish tried to wipe out all language and culture,” explained Mark. “But in the Philippines, they kept Spanish to be the language of the powerful and basically kept that information from the indigenous to keep them from gaining that power… which, in a weird way, we’ve benefitted from being able to know what baybayin looks like and relearn it.”
Although there’s not much practical use of baybayin in the Philippines anymore, many artists and scholars like Mark are trying to revive it. To hold on to it and keep it alive as it’s one of the only elements of Philippine culture that was not touched or influenced by the colonizers. “The reason that these revitalizations has come about is because people are rediscovering these scholarly sources or they’re re-finding the beauty in this decolonization process, which has always kind of been there, right?” said Mark.
Maria, an entrepreneur who started Sunkissed Pinay, makes custom jewelry in baybayin script. Kristian Kabuay, who studied anthropology and has a deep interest in pre-colonial Philippine culture, creates art with baybayin that adds a modern twist. In 2018, the Philippine Congress declared baybayin as the National Writing system in the Philippines where, as the bill outlined, promised to preserve the language and “foster wider appreciation on its importance and beauty.”
The future of baybayin and its relevance to today’s culture seem like a promising one, with a new generation issuing a wave of resurgence. And with artists sharing and raising awareness on social media, we see a slow rising trend. Despite this slow renaissance, it won’t be revived in a way that we’re writing baybayin like how we write English. “I think it’s going to be something that Filipinos around the world will be able to culturally reclaim, and to an extent be educated, but it’s not going to be […] owned by newspapers or your birth certificate is not going to be in baybayin.”
At the core of the onion sits humanity’s power: language. It is how we communicate to one another and I find it truly fascinating how there’s a plethora of ways to communicate, both verbally and spoken, and how much that changes over the course of history. The language we speak has a cultural significance and it’s evolution represents the history of where we speak this tongue. Baybayin may be lost in the noise of a modernizing and growing language, but it’s not completely gone. It represents our indigenous roots, the part we hold onto to empower a part of our identities that some of us have forgotten.
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