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In the 1890s, the initials "KKK," and sometimes just the letter "K," were emblems of the revolutionary brotherhood that challenged the Spanish colonial state in the Philippines. The letters stood for the longer formal name of the "Kataastaasan Kagalang-galang na Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan" [Highest and Most Respectable Society of the Sons of the Country], but the group was generally referred to simply as the "Katipunan" [Society]. "K" appeared as a kind of logo on flags, seals, pledge forms, and other documents and markers of the revolutionary organization.1 Though the language of the revolutionaries, Tagalog, had been written with Roman letters for centuries, it had never used the letter "k" until a few years before the revolution was waged under the banner of that very letter-instead, the hard "k" sound was usually represented with either a "c" or "qu," according to Spanish spelling conventions. Why, then, was this radical organization's name not the "Cataastaasan Cagalang-galang na Catipunan"?Why "KKK" rather than "CCC"?
The answer that we will find is both particular and general. At a general level, the answer has to do with the power of orthography to represent a language, not just literally, but also emblematically and politically. In this way "k" is no different from other letters, alphabets, or scripts that might stand as flags or markers of a language, banners of its being, proof of its uniqueness. In historical moments where a spoken language can be represented by more than one script, that visual difference between the scripts generally marks a political difference as well. A script represents something more than just the sounds or words of a language; it represents a political identity that can be flagged by the choice to employ that script over another. The story of the "k" in the Philippines has to do with this more general phenomenon: orthography, or script, is politically contested.
More specifically, however, we will find that the use of the "k" as an emblem for the revolutionary movement of the Philippines is one of a number of cases where the "k" is used by a group to mark its assertion of autonomy from a more powerful group that has historically dominated it. That the "k" in particular is common to these...