- Official language in
- Philippines
- Script
- Latin
Where it's spoken
A recent article describes Waray as spoken east of Leyte and on most of the island of Samar, and says its distribution roughly matches the Eastern Bisayas region. The Philippine Constitution makes Filipino and, until otherwise provided by law, English the official languages, and the regional languages the auxiliary official languages in the regions. A study of the country's mother-tongue education lists Waray among the eight major regional languages, the ones with the greatest number of speakers.
Sources
- The 1987 Constitution of the Republic of the Philippines (The LawPhil Project text) — Art. XIV, Sec. 7 (official languages; auxiliary regional languages)
- Ehnis, Carter (2025). "Neutral and Abilitative/Involuntariness Morphology in Waray: A Comparative Analysis of the g- Prefix." Journal of Language, Culture, and Religion 6(1): 51-61 — Introduction (area where Waray is spoken; distribution roughly matching Eastern Bisayas)
- Melchor, Jillian Loise L. "The Suitability of Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) Learning Materials: An Analysis of K to 12 Ilocano Short Stories." University of Hawaii at Hilo, Humanities journal — list of the eight major regional languages, including Waray
Script & pronunciation
Waray is written in the Latin script. This app's Waray cards show the Waray text only; none of them carries a separate romanization. The card for Maupay nga gab-i ("Good evening") notes that the hyphen in gab-i marks the glottal stop in the spelling.
Sources
- Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR), supplementalData.xml and likelySubtags.xml — supplementalData.xml: language type="war" scripts="Latn"; likelySubtags.xml: war to war_Latn_PH