Sample of spoken Cia-Cia, recorded for Wikitongues
Cia-Cia, also known as (South) 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.[2] It is written using the Latin and Hangul scripts.
In 2005, there were 79,000 speakers of Cia-Cia,[1] 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.[3][unreliable source?]
Cia-Cia has been privately taught to schoolchildren in the Hangul script since 2008. The students are also taught some basic Korean.[4] The program remained active as of 2024.[5]
According to legend, Cia-Cia speakers on Binongko descend from Butonese troops sent by a Butonese sultan.[6]
Name
The name of the language comes from the negator cia, "no".[1] It is also known as Buton, Butonese, Butung,[1] and in Dutch Boetonees, names it shares with Wolio, and as South(ern) Buton or Butung.[1][7] The ambiguous name "Buton", often referring generically to various ethnic and linguistic groups of the Buton area,[8] is said to be of Ternatese origin (butu – "market", "marketplace").[9][10] Names such as "South Buton"[1][7] can be used to disambiguate from Wolio, the historically dominant language of the island.[11]
Dialects
The language situation on the island of Buton is very complicated and not known in great detail.[12]
Dialects include Kaesabu, Sampolawa (Mambulu-Laporo), Wabula (with its subvarieties), and Masiri.[13] The Masiri dialect shows the greatest amount of vocabulary in common with the standard dialect.[1] The Pedalaman dialect uses gh—equivalent to r in other dialects—in native vocabulary, and r in loan words.[14][pageneeded]
Phonology
Phonology according to Rene van den Berg (1991).[2]
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.[citation needed]
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.[16][17] 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.[18]
Lee Ki-nam (이기남), 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.[19][20] 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.[19][20] 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,[20] 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.[19] In July 2008, Lee led a delegation to Baubau to discuss the potential of adopting Hangul for Cia-Cia.[20][18] She offered to build a $500,000 Korean cultural center and establish economic ties between the area and South Korea; the deal was accepted.[20] 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.[21]
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.[20] 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.[22]
The project encountered difficulties between the city of Baubau, the Hunminjeongeum Society, and the Seoul Metropolitan Government, in 2011.[23] 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.[24] In January 2020, the publication of the first Cia-Cia dictionary in Hangul was announced;[25][26][27] it was published in December 2021.[28] This renewed interest in Hangul for Cia-Cia, and the King Sejong Institute reopened its offices in Baubau in 2022.[25] In December 2023, Agence France-Presse again published an article with interviews showcasing the Hangul effort.[29]
As of 2024, Hangul remains in use in schools and on local signs.[30][5]
↑ ᄙ is not a separate letter. The medial /r/ and /l/ are distinguished by writing a single letter (ㄹ) for /r/ and double (ᄙ) for /l/. Double ㄹ must be written in two syllables.[33] This use of a double consonant can be unambiguous, as double or syllable-final /l/ or /r/ do not exist in Cia-Cia, since the phonotactics only allow (C)V structure (with each prenasalized consonant analized as a single consonant phoneme).[2]
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Null-consonant and vowel letters (으) are added for initial /l/ and initial prenasalized consonants (/ᵐp/, /ⁿt/, /ᶮt͡ʃ/, /ᵑk/, /ᵐb/, /ⁿd/, /ᵑɡ/). When these consonants occur between vowels, they are written with one jamo in the previous syllable block and the other jamo in the following syllable block.[15]
Examples
Words
Cia-Cia, like Muna, has three sets of numerals: a free form, a prefixed form, and a reduplicated form.[2] 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.[2]
↑ Noorduyn, J. 1991. "A critical survey of studies on the languages of Sulawesi" p. 131.
1 2 Mead, David, "Cia-Cia", Sulawesi Language Alliance, retrieved 25 November 2024
↑ Anceaux, Johannes Cornelis; Grimes, Charles E.; van den Berg, René (1995), "Wolio", in Tryon, Darrell T. (ed.), Comparative Austronesian Dictionary: An Introduction to Austronesian Studies, Trends in Linguistics. Documentation, vol.10, Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, pp.573–584, doi:10.1515/9783110884012.1.573, ISBN978-3-11-088401-2, OCLC896406022
↑ Visser, Leontine E. (2019), "The Historical Paths of Sahu Ceremonial Textiles", Archipel. Études interdisciplinaires sur le monde insulindien, 98: 121–150, doi:10.4000/archipel.1560, ISSN0044-8613, OCLC8599457798, The island was their "market" or butu in Ternate language. Thus the island became known as Buton.
↑ Ryu, Il-Hyeong (6 January 2020). "표기문자 '한글' 채택한 인니 찌아찌아족 '언어사전' 첫 편찬"[First dictionary of the language of the Cia-Cia people in Indonesia that adopted Hangul to be compiled]. Yonhap News (in Korean). Archived from the original on 6 January 2020.
↑ Wells, John (20 October 2009). "Cia-Cia". John Wells's phonetic blog. With one exception, the Cia-Cia phonemes can be mapped onto a subset of those of Korean and are therefore written the same way. The exception is the fricative /v/, which is not found in contemporary Korean, but for which Lee resurrected the obsolete hangul jamo (or Korean letter) ᄫ (U+112B). (ᄫ was used as a symbol for the voiced bilabial fricative.) The Cia-Cia implosives /ɓ/ and /ɗ/ are written with standard hangul jamo, as ㅍ and ㅌ. So the series /t, d, ɗ/ are written with the jamo that in Korean stand for /t*, t~d, th/ respectively, namely ㄸ, ㄷ, ㅌ.
↑ Wells, John (20 October 2009). "Cia-Cia". John Wells's phonetic blog.
↑ Yu, Jae-Yeon (6 August 2009). "印尼 소수민족, '한글' 공식 문자로 채택"[Hangul adopted as official alphabet of Indonesian minority group]. No Cut News (in Korean). Archived from the original on 15 November 2021.
↑ Example is part of a textbook: Lee, Ho-Young; Hwang, Hyo-sung; Abidin (2009). 바하사 찌아찌아 1 [Bahasa Cia-Cia 1]. Hunmin jeongeum Society of Korea.
Mustafa Abdullah. 1985. Struktur bahasa Cia-Cia. Proyek Penelitian Bahasa dan Sastra Indonesia dan Daerah Sulawesi Selatan, Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan.
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