Indonesian Tribe Adopts Korean Hangul to Preserve Ancient Cia-Cia Language

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.

Excited chatter filled the classroom as the lesson began. Every desk had a paper nameplate on it with the occupant’s name written in the Korean alphabet, called Hangul. Soon, the students were following their instructor’s lead and etching the distinctive circles and lines of the script in their notebooks.

But these fourth graders were not studying the Korean language. They were 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.

“Say, ‘ph.’ Hold a piece of paper in front of your mouth and make sure the paper moves when you pronounce it,” Deuk-young Jung, who has been teaching the alphabet here for more than a decade, told his 40 or so students at Hendea Elementary School, south of the town of Baubau.

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. 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.

“Language is the wealth of a community, a legacy,” said Amirul Tamim, a former mayor of Baubau who was been instrumental in efforts to preserve the Cia-Cia language. “Language shows the civilization of a tribe, and a language without its own alphabet loses its authenticity.”

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.

“We borrow the Hangul to preserve our language. We mix and match the old and modern alphabet and that makes it uniquely Cia-Cia,” he said, referring to some Hangul characters that are rarely used in Korean these days.

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.

“Indonesia’s culture is diverse and resilient,” said Mr. Amirul, the former mayor. “Let us not close ourselves to the entry of other cultures. We have the means to preserve our traditional language, so why allow it to become extinct?”

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.

In the Sorawolio district of Baubau today, the names of streets, schools and public facilities are displayed in the Roman and Korean alphabets. Schools have made their own textbooks, and fourth- through sixth-grade students are taught the Korean script.

“It’s easy to learn the Hangul because we are familiar with the words already as we speak it at home,” said Nurfin, 24, who once was among the top three students in her Hangul class. “I still remember some, but because I rarely use it, I have forgotten a lot.”

Cia-Cia remains largely a spoken language. Relatively few members of the tribe are conversant with Hangul. The language also faces pressure from the dominance of Bahasa Indonesia.

“It is good to have a written form of the language, but more importantly to have it spoken and used in daily life,” Djunuddin, a local elder, said of Cia-Cia. “Children nowadays, they don’t speak the Cia-Cia language anymore. They are so used to using Bahasa Indonesia, only us, the older generation, still speaks it,” he said. Many native words have been lost, he said.

Fears about the tribe’s future have prompted community elders and scholars to work together to preserve the language. Native words are continually being collected and written down in Hangul, with guidance from the elders. Parents are being encouraged to speak Cia-Cia to their children at home, and folk tales are being transcribed into Hangul for the younger generation to learn.

“When a language becomes extinct, the identity, the local wisdom of that tribe will also disappear,” said La Ode Alirman, a sociologist who lives in Baubau. “By documenting our folk tales, we get to pass on our local wisdom, the history of our ancestors, our memory and tribe’s identity to the next generation for them to hold on to.”

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