It’s a rainy afternoon here in Manila. I know it hasn’t been long since my last post, but yesterday’s interview with an artist who works with Baybayin left me with so many lasting impressions that I felt it deserved a post of its own. I hope this post leaves you with even a fraction of the awe and excitement yesterday’s conversation gave me.
First, some background information: Baybayin is an ancient, pre-colonial Filipino script that was once used to write Tagalog, which remains one of the most commonly spoken languages in the Philippines. Today, Tagalog is written with the same Latin alphabet I’m using to write this post, but its sounds were once carved into elegant sweeps of intersecting swirls and dots, using characters from the alphabet below:
The ancient script faded from everyday use over centuries, but in recent years, there’s been a growing movement to bring it back. On Monday afternoon, I had the opportunity to speak with a visual artist whose work centers around Baybayin calligraphy. We met at a café in Quezon City, one of Metro Manila’s many puzzle pieces. His story begins at the University of the Philippines, where he studied design and fine arts before moving to Japan for a career opportunity. There, he worked under a Shodō artist, studying Japanese calligraphy for the better part of a year. He told me that what struck him most in Japan wasn’t the art form itself, but the way calligraphy was treated as an extension of cultural identity. He saw Japanese people of all ages practicing this centuries-old tradition, and realized he was investing more energy in understanding someone else’s culture than his own. So, he moved back to the Philippines to do the same with Baybayin.
Learning Baybayin wasn’t hard, he said. The script maps pretty directly onto modern spoken Tagalog – it’s just another writing system. He didn’t take any formal classes; like most people who start learning Baybayin, he just Googled a chart (much like the one above). His art style is very specific: large-scale, one-of-a-kind acrylic paintings on canvas. He doesn’t work with prints or merchandise much because his interest is in Baybayin as fine art, although Baybayin can be seen on some storefronts, souvenirs, currency, and passports. He primarily uses chisel-tip acrylic markers (not brushes), since they’re the best for large-scale precision. Smaller, brush-style calligraphy still shows up in his paper-based work, but his current practice is very shaped by scale and form.
There are two strands to his work: the art and the advocacy. The art is what sustains him, and what allows him to give talks and workshops about his art and journey for free. He’s especially drawn to the Filipino diaspora, because, as he put it, the diaspora is often more “hungry” for this sort of cultural anchor than Philippine-born Filipinos. When he visits Filipino communities abroad, especially in the U.S., he meets younger people who were raised by immigrant parents who intentionally distanced them from Tagalog. A lot of these kids were raised not to speak with an accent, or taught that sounding American was important. Now, as young adults, they’re trying to reconnect. He told me about a U.S. tour he did in 2022, where he visited universities, Filipino community centers, and even big companies like Google. Back in the Philippines, he’s collaborated with foreign embassies and is currently working with the Filipino embassy in Japan on an exhibit celebrating 70 years of diplomatic relations.
As we talked, the conversation shifted toward the script itself – not just what Baybayin says, but how it looks. His interest in the form of writing started in childhood, when he loved the visual feel of orthography more than the meaning of the words. That fascination has matured into a kind of visual etymology – a theory about why the script’s symbols look the way they do. Scholars currently think the Baybayin script, with its curved and elegant form (which lends itself beautifully to calligraphy), likely descends from or was influenced by other Southeast Asian scripts like Kawi, once used across Java, Bali, and Sumatra. Both Kawi and Baybayin are abugidas, meaning that consonant-vowel pairs are written as a single unit. In contrast to English, where consonants and vowels are represented by separate letters, an abugida uses one character for a consonant and its inherent vowel. Diacritics – symbols added above, below, or around the character – are then used to change or remove that vowel sound (much like accent marks in French). If you look for it, you can often see a script’s origin in its shapes; ancient Greek, for example, is quite angular because it is much harder to etch a curved line into stone or clay than a straight one. According to my interlocutor, Baybayin seems to carry a similar intentionality.
He shared his theory on the character for “ka”, a prefix in Tagalog that denotes companionship or a shared experience of some sort (kapatid = sibling, kapitbahay = neighbor) – it’s relational. He pointed out that “ka” in Baybayin contains visual echoes of the character “ha”, which is the root of words like hangin (wind, nature spirit, ancestors) and hinga (breathing, living). In fact, “ka” looks like it’s composed of two “ha” symbols. His theory? That “ha” originally symbolized something like the breath of life, or spirit, and that “ka” – with its doubled “ha”-like elements – visually represents two spirits, or individuals, in relation. “Ka,” he says, puts the self in the context of a collective. It was fascinating to hear someone approach the script not from a strictly linguistic angle but from an aesthetic and artistic one.
After all this, he paused for a second, shared that he knew of a nearby art supplies store, and said he would be right back. A few minutes later, he returned with a notebook and three markers. He showed me the difference between brush and chisel tips, explained the varying levels of control with each, and then began his calligraphy. He first illustrated a few common words he uses in his work (like tiwala, meaning “trust”). Then, he did my name – both my first and last. “Maya” was simple to write, easy to syllabify. But my surname – Kraidy, of Lebanese origin – took some effort. When I saw him struggling to transliterate it into Baybayin, I offered up its original Arabic pronunciation; the sound mapping seemed to click into place for him. It reminded me of what happens when I try to write names in Arabic that are from another language – the sounds don’t match perfectly, so you have to reshape things. The classic example referenced among friends and family in Qatar is the bilingual shop signs found on Papa John’s pizza storefronts, in which the Arabic reads something more like “Baba Zhoonz.”
The Arabic pronunciation of my surname actually “fit” better into Baybayin than the English. A lot of people, he mentioned, actually mistake his art for Arabic calligraphy, and it’s not hard to see why. Both Baybayin and Arabic share a flowing aesthetic, and both use small marks – dots, dashes, – to indicate vowel changes. It was truly amazing to watch his artistic process unfold in front of me, and to relate it to one of my own native languages.
“Kraidy” in Baybayin calligraphy
He ended up gifting me this notebook at the end of the interview. On our way out of the café, we discussed some “Filipinisms” – expressions and habits that make perfect sense here but might confuse outsiders. I’ll include some of those in a future blog post, to save you from scrolling forever. I didn’t expect to walk away with so many thoughts and a notebook full of original art when I ordered my iced milk tea, but here we are. Turns out iced milk tea pairs perfectly with ancestral scripts and spontaneous wisdom.