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The earliest known use of the word to refer to the script was from the Vocabulario de la lengua tagala (1613) by Pedro San Buenaventura as baibayin.

Historically Southeast Asia was under the influence of Ancient India, where numerous Indianized principalities and empires flourished for several centuries in Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Cambodia and Vietnam.

[21] French archaeologist George Coedes defined it as the expansion of an organized culture that was framed upon Indian originations of royalty, Hinduism and Buddhism and the Sanskrit language.

[23] Examples of these include raja, rani, maharlika, and datu, which were transmitted from Indian culture to Philippines via Malays and the Srivijaya empire.

[citation needed] Indian Hindu colonists played a key role as professionals, traders, priests and warriors.

It was written in the Kawi script in a variety of Old Malay containing numerous loanwords from Sanskrit and a few non-Malay vocabulary elements whose origin is ambiguous between Old Javanese and Old Tagalog.

Geoff Wade has argued that the baybayin characters "ga", "nga", "pa", "ma", "ya" and "sa" display characteristics that can be best explained by linking them to the Cham script, rather than other Indic abugidas.

It appears that the Luzon and Palawan varieties started to develop in different ways in the 1500s, before the Spaniards conquered what we know today as the Philippines.

[1][37] Although one of Ferdinand Magellan's shipmates, Antonio Pigafetta, wrote that the people of the Visayas were not literate in 1521, the baybayin had already arrived there by 1567 when Miguel López de Legazpi reported from Cebu that, "They [the Visayans] have their letters and characters like those of the Malays, from whom they learned them; they write them on bamboo bark and palm leaves with a pointed tool, but never is any ancient writing found among them nor word of their origin and arrival in these islands, their customs and rites being preserved by traditions handed down from father to son without any other record.

"[38] A century later, in 1668, Francisco Alcina wrote: "The characters of these natives [Visayans], or, better said, those that have been in use for a few years in these parts, an art which was communicated to them from the Tagalogs, and the latter learned it from the Borneans who came from the great island of Borneo to Manila, with whom they have considerable traffic... From these Borneans the Tagalogs learned their characters, and from them the Visayans, so they call them Moro characters or letters because the Moros taught them... [the Visayans] learned [the Moros'] letters, which many use today, and the women much more than the men, which they write and read more readily than the latter.

"[39] The earliest printed book in a Philippine language, featuring both Tagalog in baybayin and transliterated into the Latin script, is the 1593 Doctrina Christiana en Lengua Española y Tagala.

There is also a series of legal documents containing baybayin, preserved in Spanish and Philippine archives that span more than a century: the three oldest, all in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, are from 1591 and 1599.

[40][5] Baybayin was noted by the Spanish priest Pedro Chirino in 1604 and Antonio de Morga in 1609 to be known by most Filipinos, and was generally used for personal writings and poetry, among others.

He commented the following on his decision:[19] "The reason for putting the text of the Doctrina in Tagalog type... has been to begin the correction of the said Tagalog script, which, as it is, is so defective and confused (because of not having any method until now for expressing final consonants - I mean, those without vowels) that the most learned reader has to stop and ponder over many words to decide on the pronunciation which the writer intended."

Pedro Chirino, a Spanish priest and Antonio de Morga noted in 1604 and 1609 that most Filipino men and women could read baybayin.

[41] During the colonial period, Filipinos began keeping paper records of their property and financial transactions, and would write down lessons they were taught in church.

[19] Documents written in the native language and began to play a significant role in the judicial and legal life of the colony.

Learning the Latin alphabet also helped Filipinos to make socioeconomic progress, as they could rise to relatively prestigious positions such as clerks, scribes and secretaries.

The rarity of pre-Hispanic baybayin texts has led to a common misconception that fanatical Spanish priests must have destroyed the majority native documents.

Anthropologist and historian H. Otley Beyer wrote in The Philippines before Magellan (1921) that, "one Spanish priest in Southern Luzon boasted of having destroyed more than three hundred scrolls written in the native character".

In fact, historians have been unable to verify Beyer's claim,[19] and there is no direct evidence of substantial destruction of documents by Spanish missionaries.

[57] Hector Santos has suggested although that Spanish friars may have occasionally burned short documents such as incantations, curses and spells (deemed evil by the church) but rejected the idea that there was any systematic destruction of pre-Hispanic manuscripts.

There are also no reports of Tagalog written scriptures, as the Filipinos kept their theological knowledge in oral form while using the Baybayin for secular purposes and talismans.

[59] The scholar Isaac Donoso claims that the documents written in the native language and in native scripts played a significant role in the judicial and legal life of the colony and noted that many colonial-era documents written in baybayin still exist in some repositories, including the library of the University of Santo Tomas.

Beside these phonetic considerations, the script is monocameral and does not use letter case for distinguishing proper names or words starting sentences.

[66] In his time the kaldit was called kaholoan or holo according to Marcos de Lisboa, author of the earliest dictionary of Bikol.

ᜐᜒᜎ ᜀᜌ᜔ ᜉᜒᜈᜄ᜔ᜃᜎᜓᜂᜊᜈ᜔ ᜈᜅ᜔ ᜃᜆᜓᜏᜒᜍᜈ᜔ ᜀᜆ᜔ ᜊᜓᜇ᜔ᜑᜒ ᜀᜆ᜔ ᜇᜉᜆ᜔ ᜋᜄ᜔ᜉᜎᜄᜌᜈ᜔ ᜀᜅ᜔ ᜁᜐᜆ᜔ ᜁᜐ ᜐ ᜇᜒᜏ ᜈᜅ᜔ ᜉᜄ᜔ᜃᜃᜉᜆᜒᜍᜈ᜔᜶ Ang lahát ng tao'y isinilang na malayà at pantáy-pantáy sa karangalan at mga karapatán.

Land dear and holy, Cradle of noble heroes, Ne'er shall invaders Trample thy sacred shores.

Baybayin–Tagalog Unicode range: U+1700–U+171F The virtual keyboard app Gboard developed by Google for Android and iOS devices was updated on 1 August 2019[73] its list of supported languages.