Danao

The Danao languages form a subgroup of the Central Philippine branch of the Austronesian family, spoken in the lake and river basins of Mindanao in the southern Philippines. Its members are Maranao around Lake Lanao, Maguindanaon in the Cotabato lowlands and the Pulangi basin, and Iranun on the coasts between them.

With the coming of Islam in the early sixteenth century their speakers adopted the Perso-Arabic Jawi script, and Maguindanaon became the language of the Sultanate of Maguindanao, which dominated western Mindanao until Spanish pressure wore it down in the nineteenth century.

Iranun sailors raided the Sulu and Celebes seas in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Under Spanish rule the Latin alphabet gradually displaced Jawi, and the British captain Thomas Forrest published a vocabulary of the Maguindanao tongue in 1779.