Baybayin
The script these languages were written in before the Spanish brought the Latin alphabet. Type anything and see it converted, syllable by syllable.
Last updated
ᜋᜊᜓᜑᜌ᜔
Syllable by syllable
Mabuhay
Baybayin has three vowels and fourteen consonants, so sounds Spanish and English brought in have no character of their own — f is written with ᜉ, v with ᜊ, z with ᜐ. The conversion is lossy in that direction and cannot be reversed exactly. The alphabet guide covers how the Latin script replaced it.
It is a syllabary, not an alphabet
This is the part that trips people up. Baybayin characters are not letters: each consonant already carries an a. ᜃ is not k, it is ka. A small mark called a kudlit changes that vowel — above for i or e, below for u or o.
So a character map that swaps one letter for one glyph produces nonsense. Conversion has to work syllable by syllable, which is why the breakdown above shows the syllables rather than the letters.
Why final consonants are a choice
Traditional Baybayin could not write a consonant without a vowel at all. Bundok was written ᜊᜓᜇᜓ — bu-du — and the reader supplied the rest from what the sentence was about. That is not a flaw in the script; it is how it worked, and readers managed.
In 1620 the Spanish priest Francisco López introduced the krus-kudlit, a cross beneath a character that cancels its vowel, so religious texts could be transcribed exactly. Filipino writers of the time largely rejected it. The pamudpod, borrowed from the Mangyan scripts that survived in Mindoro, does the same job and is what many modern revivalists prefer.
There is no single right answer, so this tool offers all three rather than picking one quietly. What you choose is a small argument about whose convention to follow.
What this cannot do
It cannot convert Baybayin back to Latin reliably. The script has three vowels where the Latin alphabet writes five, and no characters for the sounds Spanish and English introduced — so i and e share a character, as do u and o, and f, v and z are written with the nearest native sound. Information is lost going in, and guessing it back would be inventing.
It is also not a translation. Typing English gives you English sounds written in Baybayin, which is not the same as writing Filipino. For actual translation, use the translator and bring the result here.
Fonts and encoding
Characters come from the Unicode Tagalog block, U+1700–U+171F, so the output is real text rather than pictures — you can copy it, search it and paste it anywhere. If it shows as empty boxes, your device has no Baybayin font installed; the text is still correct and will display for anyone who has one.