The scholar Isaac Donoso claims that the documents written in the native language and in the native script (particularly ) played a significant role in the judicial and legal life of the colony and noted that many colonial-era documents written in are still present in some repositories, including the library of the University of Santo Tomas. He also noted that the early Spanish missionaries did not suppress the usage of the script but instead they may have even promoted the script as a measure to stop Islamization, since the Tagalog language was moving from to Jawi, the Arabized script of Islamized Southeast Asian societies.