Tagbanwa is one of the scripts indigenous to the Philippines, used by the

Tagbanwa The Tagbanwa people ( Tagbanwa: ) are one of the oldest ethnic groups in the Philippines, and can be mainly found in the central and northern Palawan. Research has shown that the Tagbanwa are possible descendants of the Tabon Man, thus making th ...

and the

Palawan people The Palawan tribal people, also known as the Palawano or the Palaw'an, are an indigenous ethnic group of the Palawan group of islands in the Philippines. Palawanos are more popularly known as Palawans, which is pronounced faster than the name of ...

as their ethnic writing system. The Tagbanwa languages (

Aborlan Aborlan, officially the Municipality of Aborlan ( tgl, Bayan ng Aborlan), is a 1st class municipality in the province of , Philippines. According to the 2020 census, it has a population of 38,736 people. It lies in a vast plain between the Sulu ...

Calamian The Calamian Islands or the Calamianes is a group of islands in the province of Palawan, Philippines. It includes: * Busuanga Island * Coron Island * Culion Island * Calauit Island * Malcapuya Island * Banana Island * Pass Island * Calumbuyan I ...

and

Central Central is an adjective usually referring to being in the center of some place or (mathematical) object. Central may also refer to: Directions and generalised locations * Central Africa, a region in the centre of Africa continent, also known a ...

), which are Austronesian languages with about 25,000 total speakers in the central and northern regions of

Palawan Palawan (), officially the Province of Palawan ( cyo, Probinsya i'ang Palawan; tl, Lalawigan ng Palawan), is an archipelagic province of the Philippines that is located in the region of Mimaropa. It is the largest province in the country in t ...

, are dying out as the younger generations of Tagbanwa are learning and using non-traditional languages such as

Cuyonon Cuyonon is a regional Bisayan language spoken on the coast of Palawan and the Cuyo Islands in the Philippines.Tagalog Tagalog may refer to: Language * Tagalog language, a language spoken in the Philippines ** Old Tagalog, an archaic form of the language ** Batangas Tagalog, a dialect of the language * Tagalog script, the writing system historically used for Taga ...

, thus becoming less knowledgeable of their own indigenous cultural heritage. There are proposals to revive the script by teaching it in public and private schools with Tagbanwa populations.

Origin

The Tagbanwa script was used in the Philippines until the 17th century. Closely related to

Baybayin (, ''pre-kudlít'': , ''virama-krus-kudlít'': , ''virama-pamudpod'': ; also formerly commonly incorrectly known as alibata) is a Philippine script. The script is an abugida belonging to the family of the Brahmic scripts. Geographically, it ...

, it is believed to have come from the

Kawi script The Kawi or or Old Javanese script is a Brahmic script found primarily in Java and used across much of Maritime Southeast Asia between the 8th century and the 16th century.Aditya Bayu Perdana and Ilham Nurwansah 2020Proposal to encode Kawi/ ...

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...

Bali Bali () is a province of Indonesia and the westernmost of the Lesser Sunda Islands. East of Java and west of Lombok, the province includes the island of Bali and a few smaller neighbouring islands, notably Nusa Penida, Nusa Lembongan, and ...

and

Sumatra Sumatra is one of the Sunda Islands of western Indonesia. It is the largest island that is fully within Indonesian territory, as well as the sixth-largest island in the world at 473,481 km2 (182,812 mi.2), not including adjacent i ...

, which in turn, descended from the

Pallava script The Pallava script or Pallava Grantha, is a Brahmic script, named after the Pallava dynasty of South India, attested since the 4th century AD. As epigrapher Arlo Griffiths makes clear, however, the term is misleading as not all of the relevant s ...

, one of the southern Indian scripts derived from

Brahmi Brahmi (; ; ISO: ''Brāhmī'') is a writing system of ancient South Asia. "Until the late nineteenth century, the script of the Aśokan (non-Kharosthi) inscriptions and its immediate derivatives was referred to by various names such as 'lath' o ...

.Omniglot: Tagbanwa
Accessed October 13, 2016.

Features

Tagbanwa is a syllabic alphabet in which each consonant has an inherent vowel /a/. Other vowels are indicated by a diacritic above (for /i/) or below (for /u/) the consonant. Vowels at the beginning of syllables are represented by their own, independent characters. Syllables ending in a consonant are written without the final consonant. Tagbanwa is distinguished from

by shapes for several letters, most notably ‹k› and ‹w› that are markedly different from other Baybayin varieties. Tagbanwa is traditionally written on bamboo in vertical columns from bottom to top and left to right, though it is read from left to right in horizontal lines.

Vowels

Consonants

Tagbanwa writing makes use of single () and double () punctuation marks.

Ibalnan

In the 20th century, this script was adopted from the Tagbanwa by the Palawan people further south in the

island An island (or isle) is an isolated piece of habitat that is surrounded by a dramatically different habitat, such as water. Very small islands such as emergent land features on atolls can be called islets, skerries, cays or keys. An isla ...

. They call this alphabet Ibalnan and the vowel mark an ''ulit''.

Unicode

Tagbanwa script was added to the

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

Standard in March, 2002 with the release of version 3.2. The Unicode block for Tagbanwa is U+1760–U+177F:

References

External links

Tagbanwa font
Philippine scripts Brahmic scripts Tagbanwa {{writingsystem-stub