It was the primary language spoken in Cebu, Bohol, and other parts of Visayas and Mindanao.
The earliest surviving record of Cebuano was from a wordlist collected by Antonio Pigafetta during the Magellan expedition in 1521.
The wordlist contains about 160 Cebuano words (some of which are in Malay) written in an Italian-influenced orthography, which is considered problematic due to its inconsistent and unphonetic spelling system.
The first dedicated grammar book for Cebuano, Francisco Encina's Arte de la Lengua Zebuana, was compiled in 1801 (40 years after his death).
One of the most notable was the change from *s(i)- to *k(i)- as the direct case-marking prefix for Cebuano demonstrative (e.g. siní -> kiní) and interrogative (e.g. sinsa -> kinsa) pronouns.