Writing systems, or scripts, are tools that humans developed to document and transmit ideas that came to us using language. As it turns out, the scripts that we’ve developed are quite versatile and can be used to transcribe a variety of languages.
Consider, conveniently, the example of this article that you’re reading. It’s written in the Latin script, which is a script that’s used by a whole host of languages, including Romance languages like Spanish and Italian; Germanic languages like English and German; and even some Slavic languages like Croatian and Polish.
Conversely, there are also many languages that don’t have a script at all, meaning that they’re oral-only languages. But can an oral-only language be retrofitted with a script borrowed from a different part of the world? That’s the question that emerged as part of efforts to preserve the Cia-Cia language.
Say Hola To Cia-Cia
Cia-cia is a language spoken by around 80,000 people (as per a 2005 census) in Indonesia’s southeastern coastal region of Sulawesi. It belongs to the Austronesian language family, which consists of languages spread out across Southeast Asia, Madagascar, parts of Taiwan, and some islands in the Pacific Ocean.
To place the Cia-Cia language in its linguistic context, Indonesia is the second most linguistically diverse country in the world. The approximately 700 native languages spoken in the country make it second only to Papua New Guinea in terms of linguistic diversity. Just on the island of Buton, which is where Cia-Cia is principally spoken, there are a handful of other native languages spoken that account for almost twenty five dialects in all.
This linguistic richness is in one way a boon. It means that the diverse cultures that throng this part of the world are represented individually through their own language. Each of them has been given the chance to adequately represent itself and pass on its wisdom in a way that’s possible only in their own tongue.
However, the large quantity of languages in this small area also leads to a challenge. Each of these languages has only a small number of speakers. Take Cia-Cia, for example. With just around 80,000 speakers remaining, it is a language that’s at risk of extinction. It is under these circumstances that language conservationists came up with an ingenious way to try to preserve Cia-Cia for future generations.
Borrowing a Script, Preserving a Language
To solve the problem of the dwindling number of Cia-Cia speakers, researchers attempted to come up with a writing system for the language. This would create a way to record the language without having to solely rely on oral methods of transmitting it.
The first candidate script was Arabic, because a dialect called Wolio, which is also spoken on Buton, has been written in Arabic since the 1500s. But it soon emerged that Cia-Cia was distinct enough from Wolio that this approach wouldn’t work. As it turns out, Cia-Cia has more in common with Korean than it does Arabic.
Once this discovery was made, South Korean academics arrived at Buton. They were tasked with studying how Hangul, the South Korean writing system, could be adapted to fit the intricacies of Cia-Cia. Native speakers arrived at academic institutions like the Seoul National University and began to assiduously transcribe the oral corpus of Cia-Cia into Hangul.
In South Korea, there has been institutional backing to promote Hangul as a script that can be used to resuscitate dying language. Those efforts began with Ms Lee of the Hunminjeongeum Society, who donated a large portion of her fortune to fund research into Hangul’s applicability in adding a written dimension to otherwise oral-only languages. Seoul National University has also joined in the project, allocating significant resources to studying the same matter.
The Linguistic Experiment Pays Off?
With all of the work that South Korean institutions have been pouring into Hangul, Cia-Cia has emerged as the first successful example of the script being used to buttress a dying language. But that process has not been without its challenges.
The program that would teach school students in Buton how to write Cia-Cia using Hangul was put on hold for a decade due to a lack of competent teachers. Things began to look upward again after a Cia-Cia dictionary was published in Hangul in 2020. Now school students are taught how to write Cia-Cia in Hangul and the names of public institutions and roads are written out in the script.
These developments show that co-opting a writing system might be a viable way to preserve a dying oral-only language. However, the project also has its critics.
The primary argument against using the South Korean script is that it will lead to a dilution of Cia-Cia’s ability to remain relevant in its own cultural context. The underlying question being one of how a script can influence the language that it helps record.
As for whether this particular attempt has succeeded in preserving Cia-Cia, the jury is still out. But what this experiment does make crystal clear is that conservationists must strive to preserve not just the sanctity of the academic aspects of a language that they’re working on, but also the full spirit of the culture and people from which it emerged.
