What is Baybayin and how does it differ from the alphabet?

Baybayin is the pre-colonial Philippine writing system, an abugida where each consonant glyph already carries an inherent a vowel. Vowel marks called kudlit change that vowel, unlike the Latin alphabet where each letter is independent.

How are vowels written?

A bare consonant glyph is read with an a. A kudlit placed above the glyph changes the vowel to i or e, and a kudlit below changes it to u or o. Standalone vowels at the start of a syllable have their own dedicated glyphs.

What is the krus-kudlit virama option?

Traditional Baybayin left final consonants unwritten, so a word like pamilya was ambiguous. The Spanish-era krus-kudlit (a cross-shaped mark, Unicode U+1714) cancels the inherent vowel so coda consonants can be written. Toggle it to choose modern or historical spelling.

Why do I see boxes instead of glyphs?

Baybayin lives in the Unicode Tagalog block, and your device needs a font that supports it, such as Noto Sans Tagalog. The conversion is correct even if your current font cannot display the glyphs; copying the text into a Baybayin-capable app will show them.

Is my text uploaded anywhere?

No. The transliteration runs entirely in your browser using a fixed mapping table. Nothing you type is sent to a server.

Tagalog Baybayin Converter

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Modern Tagalog into the Baybayin abugida

Baybayin is the ancestral script of the Tagalog people, written long before the Latin alphabet arrived. It is an abugida: every consonant glyph already implies an a vowel, and small marks change that vowel. This converter maps your Latin-script Tagalog into the correct Baybayin Unicode glyphs syllable by syllable.

How it works

The converter reads the text left to right and builds syllables:

A standalone vowel maps to its own glyph — a, i/e, or u/o.
A consonant followed by a vowel uses the base consonant glyph plus a vowel mark (kudlit): nothing extra for a, a mark above for i/e, a mark below for u/o. The digraph ng is treated as one consonant with its own glyph.
A coda consonant (no following vowel) optionally takes the krus-kudlit virama to cancel the inherent vowel; with the virama off, it is left bare in the traditional style.

Characters with no Baybayin equivalent — punctuation, digits, foreign letters — pass through unchanged.

Tips and notes

For example, Mabuhay becomes a sequence of ma, bu, ha plus a final y that either takes the virama or is dropped depending on the toggle. Because Baybayin is in the Unicode Tagalog block, you may need a font like Noto Sans Tagalog to see the glyphs — the underlying text is still correct and will render in any Baybayin-aware app. This tool aims at faithful syllable mapping; some artistic or regional variants of Baybayin differ in detail.