Baybayin (ᜊᜌ᜔ᜊᜌᜒᜈ᜔, Tagalog pronunciation: [bajˈbajɪn]; also formerly known as alibata) is a Philippine script. The script is an abugida belonging to the family of the Brahmic scripts. Geographically, it was widely used in Luzon and other parts of the Philippines prior to and during the 16th and 17th centuries before being replaced by the Latin alphabet during the period of Spanish colonization. It was used in the Tagalog language and, to a lesser extent, Kapampangan-speaking areas; its use spread to the Ilocanos in the early 17th century. In the 19th and 20th centuries, baybayin survived and evolved into multiple forms—the Tagbanwa script of Palawan, and the Hanuno'o and Buhid scripts of Mindoro—and was used to create the constructed modern Kulitan script of the Kapampangan and the Ibalnan script of the Palawan people. Under the Unicode Standard and ISO 15924, the script is encoded as the Tagalog block.
The Archives of the University of Santo Tomas in Manila, one of the largest archives in the Philippines, currently possesses the world's biggest collection of ancient writings in baybayin. The chambers which house the writings are part of a tentative nomination to UNESCO World Heritage List that is still being deliberated on, along with the entire campus of the University of Santo Tomas.
Despite being primarily a historic script, the baybayin script has seen some revival in the modern Philippines. It is often used in the insignia of government agencies and books are frequently published either partially or fully in baybayin. Bills to require its use in certain cases and instruction in schools have been repeatedly considered by the Congress of the Philippines.
For modern computers and typing, characters are in the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) and were first proposed for encoding in 1998 by Michael Everson together with three other known indigenous scripts of the Philippines.
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