The Abakada alphabet was an "indigenized"

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...

adopted for the Tagalog-based ''Wikang Pambansa'' (now Filipino) in 1939. The alphabet, which contains 20 letters, was introduced in the grammar book developed by Lope K. Santos for the newly designated national language based on Tagalog. It was officially adopted by the then Institute of National Language () and the National Commission on Culture and the Arts (). The alphabet has since been superseded by the adoption of the

Filipino alphabet The modern Filipino alphabet (), otherwise known as the Filipino alphabet (), is the alphabet of the Filipino language, the official national language and one of the two official languages of the Philippines. The modern Filipino alphabet is ma ...

(with an additional eight letters and repositioning of the letter K) in 1987.

Letters

The collation of letters in the Abakada alphabet closely follows that of other Latin alphabets, besides the digraph ''Ng'' being inserted after ''N''. When enumerating each consonant, it is always pronounced with an ⟨-a⟩ suffix (i.e., "ba", "ka", etc.). This is also the basis for the alphabet's nomenclature.

History

During the pre-Hispanic era, Old Tagalog was written using the Kawi or the Baybayin script. For three centuries Tagalog was written following, to some extent, the Spanish phonetic and orthographic rules. Dr.

José Rizal José Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda (, ; June 19, 1861 – December 30, 1896) was a Filipino nationalist, writer and polymath active at the end of the Spanish colonial period of the Philippines. He is popularly considered a na ...

was one of several proponents (including Trinidad Pardo de Tavera) of reforming the orthographies of the various Philippine languages in the late 19th-century. Like other proponents, he suggested to "indigenize" the alphabet of the Philippine languages by replacing the letters ''C'' and ''Q'' with ''K''. Initially, these reforms were not broadly adopted when they were proposed but gradually became popular into the early 20th century. Following the establishment of the Philippine Commonwealth in 1935, the government selected Tagalog as basis for a "national language" (i.e. Filipino). Following this, the development of a dictionary and grammar book for this "national language" started. In 1939, Lope K. Santos developed the ''Ang Balarila ng Wikang Pambansa'' (The Grammar of the National Language) which, apart from containing grammar rules, contained the 20-letter alphabet designated as ''Abakada''. The Abakada was replaced in 1976 with an expanded alphabet containing an additional 11 letters (C, CH, F, J, LL, Ñ, Q, RR, V, X, and Z) which was in turn replaced with the current 28-letter modern alphabet. At present, all

languages of the Philippines There are some 130 to 195 languages spoken in the Philippines, depending on the method of classification. Almost all are Malayo-Polynesian languages native to the archipelago. A number of Spanish-influenced creole language, creole varieties ge ...

may be written using the modern

(officially adopted in 1987), which includes all the letters of the Abakada.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Abakada alphabet Latin alphabets Orthographies by language Filipino language Tagalog language Cebuano language Hiligaynon language Ilocano language 1940 introductions 1940 in the Philippines

Letters

History

See also

References