This is a story we've been following for well over a decade (see "Selected readings"). Improbable as it may seem that the Korean alphabet might be adaptable for writing an Austronesian language of Indonesia, there are some promoters of this idea who continue to push it enthusiastically:
"An Indonesian Tribe’s Language Gets an Alphabet: Korea’s
The Cia-Cia language has been passed down orally for centuries. Now the tribe’s children are learning to write it in Hangul, the Korean script." By Muktita Suhartono, NYT (Nov. 4, 2024)
These fourth graders are not studying the Korean language. They are using Hangul to write and learn theirs:
Cia-Cia, an indigenous language that has no script. It has survived orally for centuries in Indonesia, and is now spoken by about 93,000 people in the Cia-Cia tribe on Buton Island, southeast of the peninsula of Sulawesi Island in Indonesia’s vast archipelago.
Indonesia is home to myriad tribes and cultures, and to more than 700 native languages. It is the most linguistically diverse nation in the world after neighboring Papua New Guinea [839 known languages). On Buton Island alone, there are a handful of local languages and almost two dozen dialects. However, most of them are at risk of disappearing because they do not have a script.
I wonder if that is a fair statement to make. Does a language need to have a written language to survive?
A former mayor of Baubau, where this experiment is being carried out, says: “Language shows the civilization of a tribe, and a language without its own alphabet loses its authenticity.” Again, I ask, is that a fair statement to make?
Conservationists initially tried using Arabic script for Cia-Cia because the syllable-timed language, unlike Indonesia’s national language, could not be easily transliterated into the Roman alphabet. On Buton, most people speak the Wolio dialect, which has been written in the Arabic alphabet since the 1500s. But Arabic turned out to be unsuitable for Cia-Cia, which has more in common with Korean.
In 2009, Hangul was introduced as a script for Cia-Cia after a visit by South Korean academics. Two instructors were sent from Baubau to South Korea to learn Hangul and develop a method for using it to teach Cia-Cia.
Abidin, a native Cia-Cia speaker who like many Indonesians goes by a single name, was one of them. He spent six months at Seoul National University and is considered the pioneer of transcribing Cia-Cia into Hangul.
“After I learned Hangul, I found that there are certain Cia-Cia tones and pronunciations that could be denoted by Hangul characters. It’s not exactly the same but it’s really close,” Mr. Abidin said.
The experiment is not without its detractors:
Some critics have raised concerns about the use of Hangul, saying it could lead to cultural domination or distort the community’s identity. But others argue that the international mix could benefit the preservation process.
Furthermore, the effort to implement Hangul writing for Cia-Cia has not been smooth:
Seoul National University has tried for several years to promulgate Hangul — which was developed by a Korean king, Sejong, in the 1400s — as a script for languages without a writing system. Cia-Cia has been its only success.
Even that program, under which elementary to high school students were taught Hangul, was shelved in Baubau for a decade because of a lack of teachers, among other issues. It found new momentum after a Cia-Cia dictionary was published in 2020, which uses Hangul characters and gives a translation of the word into Bahasa Indonesia, the national language.
I presume that the Bahasa Indonesia translations are written in the Latin alphabet, which is also used for street signs and for other purposes. So Hangul usage for Cia-Cia is ironically somewhat dependent on Latin script.
It should be phonologically testable whether there is empirical evidence indicating that Hangul is better suited than Latin script for writing Cia-Cia. Don't forget that Arabic script was also tried and found wanting, while the national script in Indonesia is Latin, many of the regional languages of Southeast Asia are based on the Latin alphabet, and Hangul for Cia-Cia itself is partially dependent on the Latin script for support, as shown in the previous paragraph.
A few basic facts
Cia-Cia, also known as Buton or Butonese, is an Austronesian language spoken principally around the city of Baubau on the southern tip of Buton island, off the southeast coast of Sulawesi, in Indonesia. It is written using the Latin and Hangul scripts.
Wikipedia
Native speakers: 79,000 (2005)
Overall, the idea that Hangul will work well for Cia-Cia and other non-Koreanic languages of Southeast Asia is a quirkish manifestation of politico-culturally motivated language reform.
Selected readings
[Thanks to Don Keyser]
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