The Ciacia people—an indigenous community of about 80,000 in Baubau city on Buton Island, Southeast Sulawesi—have adopted the Korean Hangul script to preserve their endangered language, which historically lacked a standardized writing system, according to linguist Dalan Mehuli Perangin-angin, after earlier attempts using Arabic-based Gundul script proved unsuitable because many Ciacia words changed meaning when written.
A cultural exchange launched in 2009 between Baubau officials and South Korean scholars from Seoul National University, including professor Lee Ho-young and the Hunminjeongeum Society, led to teachers and students receiving Hangul training in Korea, with educator Abidin spending six months developing a way to transcribe Ciacia sounds using Korean characters.
Because Ciacia is syllable-based and contains phonetic patterns difficult to represent with the Latin alphabet used for Bahasa Indonesia, Abidin found Hangul’s phonetic system better suited to capturing sounds such as “pha” and “ta,” motivating Baubau’s adoption of the 15th-century script.
Hangul has since been taught from elementary to high school levels, the first Ciacia dictionary in Hangul was published in 2021, and the King Sejong Institute reopened in 2022—making Baubau the only place in Indonesia where Hangul functions as an official writing system for a local language.
However, researcher Emily Paige Havens of Dallas International University notes that Hangul still struggles to represent Ciacia’s many vowel-only syllables and is less familiar to local speakers already used to Latin and Arabic scripts, suggesting that a modified Latin alphabet may ultimately offer a more accessible long-term solution for the community.
