Dulangan Manobo

The Dulangan Manobo people live mostly in the western mountains of Sultan Kudarat Province, especially in the municipalities of Senator Ninoy Aquino, Bagumbayan, Palimbang, Kalamansig, and Lebak.

In some literature, they are called Cotabato Manobo, and within the indigenous cultural community, there's a growing call for both members and outsiders to use Mënubù Dulangan, which is more faithful to the grammar and phonetics of the community's language.

In 1979, the Summer Institute of Linguistics estimated the population of the Dulangan Manobo at 10,000. This figure, however, may not be accurate because the researchers stayed only in a few villages. In 1999, the Indigenous Peoples Ministry of the Archdiocese of Cotabato conducted a more comprehensive study, and the researchers were able to identify 102 Dulangan Manobo settlements with a population of nearly 40,000.

The Dulangan Manobo do not look much different from most Filipinos, but their population seem to have a much higher percentage of people with curly hair than the population of Christians who settled in the area in the second half of the twentieth century.

More than half of the Dulangan Manobo have adopted the religion and other practices of the Christian settlers, so it is difficult to tell them apart. Traditionally, the Dulangan Manobo chewed betel quid, making their teeth red, and the men wore a tubaw (headscarf) and the women wore brass jewelry, such as huge loop earrings and an ornate belt with tiny bells.