Learn Baybayin/Reading and Writing

Kindly refer to the introduction for the full character chart.

Each letter has a vowel sound. By default, Baybayin letters are consonants with an inherent vowel "a". To produce another vowel sound, a special mark (known as a kudlít) is placed either on the top of the character (for "E" and "I" sounds) or at the bottom (for "O" and "U" sounds). The kudlít does not apply to stand-alone vowels, as they have their own characters.



In the original form, stand-alone consonants (consonants without the vowel sound) could not be formed. This was particularly hard for Spanish friars, who were working on translating books into Tagalog. In 1620, Father Francisco Lopez rectified the problem by inventing his own kudlít in the form of a cross sign ("+") that removed the vowel sound. The kudlít functions exactly the same way the virama functions in the Devanagari script used to write Hindi. This is called TAGALOG SIGN VIRAMA by Unicode.



Exercise
After learning how to read and write the Baybayin script, you can now practice reading and writing Baybayin.