Indigenous Indonesians use Korean letters to save dialect

TOPSHOT - This picture taken on October 14, 2023 shows participants in traditional Korean attire holding signage in the Korean Hangul script, used to document the language of the Cia-Cia ethnic group which has no written form, during the city's anniversary event in Baubau on Buton island, Southeast Sulawesi. In an eastern Indonesian village, schoolchildren scrawl the distinctive circles and lines of Hangul script on a whiteboard, but the language they are learning is not Korean. It is their own Indigenous Cia-Cia tongue. (Photo by Yuli Purnomo Sidi / AFP) / To go with AFP story Indonesia-Korea-language-tradition, FOCUS by Riza Salman with Agnes Anya in Jakarta

BAUBAU: In an eastern Indonesian village, schoolchildren scrawl the distinctive circles and lines of Hangul script on a whiteboard, but the language they are learning is not Korean. It is their own Indigenous Cia-Cia tongue.

The language of the Cia-Cia ethnic group in southeast Sulawesi province's Baubau has no written form, and the syllable-based tongue does not readily translate to the Latin alphabet often used to transcribe Indonesia's national language.