Precolonial barangay in the context of "Sultanate of Sulu"

The barangay (/bɑːrɑːŋˈɡaɪ/; abbreviated as Brgy. or Bgy.), historically known as the barrio, is the smallest administrative division in the Philippines. Named after the precolonial polities of the same name, modern barangays are political subdivisions of cities and municipalities, and are analogous to villages, districts, neighborhoods, suburbs, or boroughs. The term barangay is derived from balangay, a type of boat used by Austronesian peoples when they migrated to the Philippines.

All cities, including independent cities, and municipalities in the Philippines are politically subdivided into barangays, with the exception of the municipalities of Adams in Ilocos Norte and Kalayaan in Palawan, each of which contains only one barangay. Barangays are sometimes informally subdivided into smaller areas called purok (English: "zone"), or barangay zones consisting of clusters of houses for organizational purposes, and sitios, which are territorial enclaves—usually rural—located far from the poblacion. As of January 2025, there are 42,011 barangays throughout the country.

Rajah Humabon (also Hamabao or Hamabar in other editions of the "First Voyage Around the World"), later baptized as Don Carlos Valderrama, was one of the recorded chiefs in the historic polity of Cebu who encountered Ferdinand Magellan in the 16th century. Humabon ruled at the time of the arrival of Portuguese-born Spanish explorer Ferdinand Magellan in the Philippines in 1521. Humabon, his wife, and his subjects were the first known Christian converts in the Philippines. However, since there were no Catholic priests in Cebu from 1521 to 1565, this Christianity was not practised until the return of the Spaniards to Cebu. There is no official record of Humabon's existence before the Spanish contact. The existing information was written by Magellan's Italian voyage chronicler, Antonio Pigafetta on Humabon and the indigenous Philippine peoples that existed prior to Spanish colonization. Rajah Humabon is cited as the reason for why Magellan fought in the Battle of Mactan, as the latter wanted to earn the trust of Humabon by helping him subdue his opponent Lapulapu, one of the chiefs (or datu) of Mactan. Despite being referred to as "king" in the journal of Antonio Pigafetta, he was not one in the manner of a monarch in centralized societies, it is plausible that the title was mistakenly applied because according to succeeding chroniclers, there were no kingdoms in the pre-colonial Philippines.

According to the book "Visayas en la Epoca de la Conquista" ("Visayas at the Time of Conquest") published in 1889 by Isabelo de los Reyes, the name was also pronounced as Hamabao which contains the Cebuano word, mabaw, "shallow" and the prefix ha-, which is added to adjectives referring to degree, or in poetic usage, gives formal flavor to the style. This is possible as it is common in Philippine languages wherein the sounds of /d/, tapped /ɾ/, and /l/ are sometimes identical to one another, case in point danaw and lanaw ("lake") as in Maguindanao, Maranao, and Lanao. Using this trend, it is possible that the sound shifted through either the /l/ sound shifting to /w/ or through /r/ to /l/ and then eventually /w/.