Cia-Cia language

Cia-Cia, also known as Buton or Butonese, is an Austronesian language spoken principally around the city of Baubau on the southern tip of Buton island, off the southeast coast of Sulawesi, in Indonesia. It is written using the Latin and Hangul scripts.

Demographics

In 2012, there were 105,000 speakers of Cia-Cia, many of whom also used Wolio, which is closely related to Cia-Cia, as well as Indonesian. Wolio is falling into disuse as a written language among the Cia-Cia, as it is written using the Arabic script, and Indonesian is now taught in schools using the Latin script.
In two of the approximately 75 Cia-Cia-speaking subdistricts, the language has been privately taught to schoolchildren using the Hangul script since 2008. The students are also taught some basic Korean. The program remained active as of 2025.

Geographic distribution

Cia-Cia is spoken in Southeast Sulawesi, south Buton Island, Binongko Island, and Batu Atas Island.
According to legend, Cia-Cia speakers on Binongko descend from Butonese troops sent by a Butonese sultan.

Name

The name of the language comes from the negator cia, "no". It is also known as Buton, Butonese, Butung, and in Dutch Boetonees, names it shares with Wolio, and as South Buton or Butung. The ambiguous name "Buton", often referring generically to various ethnic and linguistic groups of the Buton area, is said to be of Ternatese origin. Names such as "South Buton" can be used to disambiguate from Wolio, the historically dominant language of the island.

Dialects

The language situation on the island of Buton is very complicated and not known in great detail.
Dialects include Kaesabu, Sampolawa, Wabula, and Masiri. The Masiri dialect shows the greatest amount of vocabulary in common with the standard dialect. The Pedalaman dialect uses gh—equivalent to r in other dialects—in native vocabulary, and r in loan words.

Phonology

Phonology according to Rene van den Berg.

Consonants

Notes:

is realized as a palatal affricate before high vowels and
is either an alveolar trill, or a voiced velar fricative or uvular trill, depending on the dialect

Vowels

Cia-cia has a common five-vowel system.
/, / may also be heard as open-mid .

Orthography

Cia-Cia was once written in a Jawi-like script called Gundhul, based on Arabic, with five additional consonant letters but no signs for vowels.

Hangul

The Korean alphabet, called Hangul internationally, was invented in the 15th century by the Korean king Sejong the Great. The writing system has since received significant praise from international linguists and is now considered a point of pride for Koreans. South Korean linguists have been attempting to spread the script outside of Korea, particularly to languages that do not yet have their own writing systems. In the 1990s, a Hangul-based alphabet was devised for the Lahu language of China and Southeast Asia, but this did not see significant adoption.
Lee Ki-nam, whose father was a linguist, became a significant force in advocating for Hangul's use for Cia-Cia. During the 1910–1945 Japanese colonial period in Korea, teaching Hangul was at times persecuted; the elder Lee was once dismissed from a teaching position for secretly teaching it to his students. Around the 1990s, after retiring from her career, Lee Ki-nam began to do missionary and charitable work, and she developed an interest in spreading Hangul to ethnic groups with languages that did not already have well-established writing systems. Beginning in 2003, with the help of South Korean Christian missionaries, she tried to spread Hangul in Nepal, Mongolia, Vietnam, and China, but her efforts had limited success, so she began contacting linguists to aid her in this task. In 2007, she met with Kim Ju-won, a linguist at Seoul National University, who, along with several others, expressed interest in the project. In October of that year, they established the Hunminjeongeum Society. In July 2008, Lee led a delegation to Baubau to discuss the potential of adopting Hangul for Cia-Cia. She offered to build a $500,000 Korean cultural center and establish economic ties between the area and South Korea; the deal was accepted. Donations were also sent from South Korea to Baubau; Jeong Hyeon-tae, head of Namhae County, sent around ₩5 million worth of school supplies to Baubau.
Two teachers representing two language groups in Baubau went to Seoul for a six-month training course in Hangul at SNU. One of them quit, but the other returned to Baubau in July 2009 to begin teaching Hangul to 50 third-graders. This later expanded to two more schools. The then-mayor of Baubau, Amirul Tamim, said he would consult the Indonesian government on whether Hangul could be adopted as an official script. However, Chun Tai-hyun, a linguist who first proposed the project to Tamim in 2007, said he found the prospect unlikely, as Indonesian law requires that all tribal languages use the Latin script for national unity.
The project encountered difficulties between the city of Baubau, the Hunminjeongeum Society, and the Seoul Metropolitan Government, in 2011. The King Sejong Institute, which had been established in Baubau in 2011 to teach Hangul to locals, abandoned its offices after a year of operation, in 2012. In January 2020, the publication of the first Cia-Cia dictionary in Hangul was announced; it was published in December 2021. This renewed interest in Hangul for Cia-Cia, and the King Sejong Institute reopened its offices in Baubau in 2022. In December 2023, Agence France-Presse again published an article with interviews showcasing the Hangul effort.
As of 2025, Cia-Cia's use of Hangul remains limited to schools and local signs in the two subdistricts that originally adopted the program.

Examples

Words

Cia-Cia, like Muna, has three sets of numerals: a free form, a prefixed form, and a reduplicated form. The prefixed form is used before units of 10, 100, and 1,000, and before classifiers and measure nouns. The reduplicated form is used after units of ten when counting. ompulu is an irregular exception.

	Latin	Hangul
1	dise, ise	디세, 이세
2	rua, ghua	루아, 쿠아
3	tolu	똘루
4	pa'a	빠아
5	lima	을리마
6	no'o	노오
7	picu	삐쭈
8	walu, oalu	ᄫᅡᆯ루, 오알루
9	siua	시우아
10	ompulu	옴뿔루
29	rua-pulu-po-picu	루아-뿔루-뽀-삐쭈
80	walu-pulu	ᄫᅡᆯ루-뿔루

Sentences

An example of the Hangul script, followed by the Latin alphabet and IPA:

Rene van den Berg provides a few more examples.