Eskayan is an artificial auxiliary language of the Eskaya people of Bohol, an island province of the Philippines.

[2][3] While Eskayan has no mother-tongue speakers, it is taught by volunteers in at least three cultural schools in the southeast interior of the province.

One of its most immediately remarkable features is its unique writing system of over 1,000 syllabic characters, said to be modeled on parts of the human body,[4] and its non-Philippine lexicon.

The earliest attested document in Eskayan provisionally dates from 1908, and was on display at the Bohol Museum until September 2006.

[6] Recent research strongly suggests that the Eskayan language was created in the period after Spanish contact had been established.

Evidence of this includes the presence of "native" terms (i.e., not borrowed or calqued) for post-contact cultural categories such as pope and aeroplane.

The unusual diversity of consonant and vowel clusters accounts for this relatively large number of composite characters, which even includes superfluous symbols.

[5] Eskayan shares all the same phonemes as Boholano-Visayan (the particular variety of Cebuano spoken on Bohol) and even includes the distinctive Boholano voiced palatal affricate /d͡ʒ/ that appears in Visayan words such as maayo [maʔad͡ʒo] ('good').

With the exception of this phoneme, Eskayan shares the same basic phonology as Cebuano-Visayan, Tagalog and many other Philippine languages.

This can be seen in Eskayan words such as bosdipir [bosdɪpɪr] ('eel'), guinposlan [ɡɪnposlan] ('face'), ilcdo [ɪlkdo] ('knee') and estrapirado [ɪstrapɪrado] ('flower') that contain consonant sequences like /sd/, /np/, /sl/, /lkd/ and /str/ which do not feature in Philippine languages.

For example, Eskayan imprus 'was taken on', which is basic root, translates Cebuano gipuslan, where gi- indicates that the action is completed and performed on the grammatical agent.

Here's where the early heroes lived, Here's where they wrought peace and here they bled, Here rise the marvelous cone-shaped hills, Here's sweet kinampay grows.

Blessed with white sandy beaches, Rivers that water valleys, Seas teem with fishes and cows graze on the plains, In ev'ry home love reigns, God keep my homeland always free, Let her forever be, I pledge my strength, my heart and soul, To my dear home, Bohol.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the Eskaya community attracted the interest of local mystics who promoted the notion that their language was of exotic origin.