Using Korean to save dialect

Turning to Korean for help: Participants in traditional Korean attire holding a 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, South-East Sulawesi. — AFP

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.