Filipino Wedding Glossary › Baybayin
Baybayin
Pronunciation: bai-BAI-yin
Origin: Pre-colonial Filipino script, used by Tagalogs and other Philippine groups before Spanish colonization
A pre-colonial Filipino script used by Tagalogs and other groups; revived today in cultural and design contexts.
Baybayin is a pre-colonial Filipino script used by Tagalogs and several other Philippine ethnolinguistic groups before Spanish colonization. It is an abugida (each character represents a consonant-vowel pair).
In modern Filipino weddings, baybayin appears in personalized signage, invitation art, body art, and engraved heirlooms. Couples sometimes choose to spell their names or wedding date in baybayin as a heritage statement.
Baybayin is sometimes confused with alibata; alibata is a 20th-century misnomer popularized in some textbooks but not historically attested. Baybayin is the established term among scholars and Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino.