Cia-Cia language

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(ern) 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 (butu – "market", "marketplace"). 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 (Mambulu-Laporo), Wabula (with its subvarieties), 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 (1991).

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. 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 (이기남) 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. Lee's father was a linguist who was once dismissed from a teaching position for secretly teaching Hangul 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 (김주원), a linguist at Seoul National University (SNU), 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 (정현태), head of Namhae County, sent around ₩5 million ($4,000) 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 (pulu), 100 (hacu), and 1,000 (riwu), and before classifiers and measure nouns. The reduplicated form is used after units of ten when counting. ompulu is an irregular exception.

Sentences

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

아디

Adi

Adi.NOM

세링

sering

often

빨리

pali

very

노논또

nononto

3R-watch

뗄레ᄫᅵ시.

televisi.

television.

아마노

Amano

Father-3POS

노뽀옴바에

nopo'ombae

3R-tell-3DO

이아

ia

he

나누몬또

nanumonto

3IR-watch

뗄레ᄫᅵ시

televisi

television

꼴리에

kolie

don't

노몰렝오.

nomolengo.

3R-VM-long

Adi often watches television. His father advises him not to watch too much TV.

Rene van den Berg (1991) provides a few more examples.