One of the most defining features of the Korean language is the use of Hangul characters. While we know that Korean is the language Hangul is predominantly used in reading and writing, there are other indeed other languages that use or sort of use Hangul. Previously, and by that, I mean several years ago, we have looked at the Jeju language, a lesser-known language spoken in South Korea. Additionally, we have also looked at the proof of concept that is the use of Hangul to write Taiwanese Hokkien, which did not seem to get very far.
But today, there is an interesting push for Hangul to write a certain language. Not in South Korea, not in Taiwan, but rather, in Indonesia, more specifically, in the island of Buton in Southeast Sulawesi. This is the Cia-Cia language, also known as Butonese. As you might have guessed, this language is far from Koreanic; as an Austronesian language spoken in Indonesia, we would generally expect it to be written using the Latin alphabet, a variant of the Jawi script (which is a variation of the Arabic alphabet), or perhaps one of the many indigenous writing systems, usually abugidas, which are also used in Indonesia.
The Cia-Cia language has a unique quirk amongst its fellow Austronesian languages, but shared between some Celebic languages, the branch of Austronesian languages Cia-Cia is a part of. This is the use of implosive consonants /Ι/ and /Ι/. Additionally, Ciacia uses the bilabial approximant consonant /Ξ²/, a consonant you might also hear in some variants of Spanish in Spain. These sounds, to some Ciacia speakers, are not adequately captured by formerly used writing systems, which were largely not standardised to begin with.
For instance, in the Cia-Cia alphabet, the letters ‘v’ and ‘w’ may be used to represent the /Ξ²/ sound, while the ‘r’ or ‘gh’ may be used to represent some form of an /r/ sound, which may be articulated like a trilled Spanish ‘r’, or a uvular French ‘r’. Additionally, digraphs are used to represent the /b/ and /d/ sounds, ‘bh’ and ‘dh’, but monographs are used for their implosive counterparts. To them, using the Latin or the Gundhul alphabets to write Cia-Cia did not suit their needs, and it does not seem that Cia-Cia speakers managed to standardise these differences amongst all dialects of Cia-Cia as well.
The move towards using Hangul to write Cia-Cia started in 2009, an interesting move in this part of Indonesia. What started as a collaboration between Korean institutions and organisations like the Hunminjeongeum Society, King Sejong Institute, and the Seoul Metropolitan Government, and the local Baubau city authorities first ran into quite a bit of trouble, leading to the breakdown of cooperation in 2012. According to the Chosun Ilbo, a South Korean newspaper, this breakdown was a result of disagreement in budgeting and logistics for the use and teaching of Hangul in Baubau.
This was not the first time the spread of Hangul to unwritten languages had failed, though. Previous failures in the spread of Hangul included the Lahu language in Thailand, the Chepang language in Nepal, and the Oroqen language in China. But this, according to the founder of the Hunminjeongeum Society, Lee Ki-nam, was primarily due to the use of Korean Christian missionaries to advocate Hangul use for writing those languages. This reliance might have placed linguistic aims at a lower priority than things like spreading Christianity to speakers of those languages they want to spread Hangul to, which might not have got along well with the respective speaker communities.
However, in 2022, a revival of interest in using Hangul to write Cia-Cia sprang up. This followed the announcement of a Cia-Cia dictionary published using Hangul in 2020. Needless to say, this attracted international media attention again, just like how it did a decade before, but with more optimism. My first encounter with this was in January 2024 through a video clip published in the South China Morning Post, which summarised the sentiments of using Hangul in the Cia-Cia community, whilst touching on further controversy that may arise in Indonesia, particularly, nationalist sentiment.
But what makes the Cia-Cia language a nice target for the spread of Hangul in the first place? Proponents of Cia-Cia Hangul suggested the ease of use, as Hangul is perhaps among, or the easiest writing systems to learn. Furthermore, this might also trace back to the similarities shared between Cia-Cia and Korean. Cia-Cia, for instance, has no consonant clusters, like in Korean. This makes it easier for Cia-Cia words to be split into syllable blocks, as opposed to languages that use consonant clusters.
Korean distinguishes between aspirated, unaspirated, and tense consonants, for sounds like /k/, /t/, and /p/. This contrasts with Cia-Cia’s distinction between voiced and voiceless consonants, and for the /b/ and /d/ sounds, the implosive counterparts as well. In a way, it could allow for a smooth porting of Hangul letters to Cia-Cia, albeit with some differences. What is used to write the tense consonants in Korean is used to write the voiceless consonants in Cia-Cia, and the Hangul letters used to write unaspirated consonants in Korean are used to write the voiced consonants (and implosive ‘d’ and ‘b’) in Cia-Cia.
Perhaps the most bizarre letter is the γ Έ, used to write the /Ξ²/ sound. To my knowledge, it is not used in any Korean writing today, although it might have been used in the past. Another quirk in Cia-Cia Hangul is the use of the letter γ to write the uvular trill sound, the French ‘r’.
But among the most unusual of all, is the orthographical rules governing how the /r/ and /l/ sounds are written. As Korean does not distinguish between the two sounds, Hangul only has one letter for it, γΉ. /r/ is written in Cia-Cia with just that one γΉ, and if it is a final /r/ sound, λ₯΄ is used. /l/ is written with a double γΉ, which spans across two syllables. For example, the Cia-Cia word for ‘three’, ‘tolu‘, is written as λ루. But what happens when the /l/ sound is an initial? In this case, the first syllable block for the /l/ sound is written as μ, with the second γΉ starting the second syllable block, and the rest of the syllable. For example, the Cia-Cia word for ‘five’, ‘lima‘, is written as μ리λ§.
Hangul orthographical rules for vowel-only syllables still apply, and so, the syllable ‘a’ is written as μ, using theγ as a null consonant instead of a /Ε/ sound it also represents. For example, the Cia-Cia word for ‘one’, ‘ise‘ is written as μ΄μΈ. The glottal stop is also represented using this method, although I can only see examples of this in cases like “o’o“, and “a’a“. Using these examples, the glottal stop would be incorporated as such in μ€μ€ and μμ respectively.
Where can we find Hangul in Baubau? Well, Hangul still remains on some road signs in Baubau and the settlements surrounding it today. Additionally, with the resurgence of Hangul in writing Cia-Cia in recent years, perhaps you just might see more of such signs popping up across Kota Baubau. With a dictionary and an education of Cia-Cia using Hangul, one would expect to see more Cia-Cia publications using the Hangul writing system. For now though, to the average outsider, if you come across a Korean-looking sign in a place you least expect it to, the most likely guess you will place in your Geoguessr game would be somewhere in Buton Island in Southeast Sulawesi.
Further Reading
An introduction to the Cia-Cia language (van den Berg, 1991)
The Language Closet 