Philippine

The Philippine languages are a Malayo-Polynesian subgroup of the Austronesian family, numbering about 150 and covering the Philippine archipelago and northern Sulawesi. They include Tagalog, the Visayan languages, Ilocano, Bikol, Kapampangan and the Danao languages of Mindanao. Linguists attribute the family's unusual uniformity to the spread of a single ancestral speech that effaced earlier variety.

The oldest surviving document is the Laguna Copperplate Inscription of 900, engraved in the Kawi script in an Old Malay heavy with Sanskrit loanwords. By the sixteenth century the Luzon peoples wrote their languages in Baybayin, a Brahmic abugida, until Spanish rule gradually replaced it with the Latin alphabet.