History of the Filipino Alphabet

Before the Spanish arrived in the Philippines in the 16th century, the people of the islands used a writing script called baybayin. It was the Spaniards who introduced Western letters to the Philippines.

In the 1930s, the renowned scholar Lope K. Santos developed the abakada which is an alphabet representing the sounds in the Tagalog language. It consists of  twenty letters (five vowels and fifteen consonants). Continue reading “History of the Filipino Alphabet”

The Filipino Look of Barbie

Traditonal Filipina Barbie

The Philippines is home to a diverse people. As with Hispanics whose appearance ranges from those who can pass for Spaniards to those with strong Aztec or Incan features, there are Filipinos whose family heritage has been heavily influenced by 400 years of Spanish rule and by the Chinese incursions of the past thousand years and so tend to have lighter skin, and there are Filipinos whose ancestors did not have much contact with foreigners and so have preserved the brown skin and other features of the indigenous Malay inhabitants of the islands. Continue reading “The Filipino Look of Barbie”