A note on spelling.

There are over a hundred languages in the Philippines, each with their own set of dialects. The major ones like Cebuano, Tagalog, and Ilokano have long literary traditions with their own writing systems. Ilokano had a syllabary, kur’itan, which was then supplanted by the Spanish with the Latin alphabet. From there, standard ways of writing the language evolved overtime during the Spanish, American, and post-colonial eras. Variants of our names appear in records. For instance, letters were often interchanged: C = Q = K; Z = S; V = B; F = P; E = I; HA = A; AO = AW; O = U; LL = LI; CH = TCH = TS; Ñ = NI. The Spanish used C and Q, rarely K; I think the move to K for us is post-colonial (e.g., Ilocano versus Ilokano). There's also the addition or deletion of prepositions, prefixes, infixes, and suffixes. For instance, the Spanish de (“of” or “from”) or the Ilokano prefix ag (which can mean being "from" something, or more commonly, is verb-forming). Some of the variants of our family names that I have seen used in our records and used by others are listed below.