Not giving up on Hangul for Cia-Cia
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This is a story we've been following for well over a decade (see "Selected readings"). Improbable as it may seem that the Korean alphabet might be adaptable for writing an Austronesian language of Indonesia, there are some promoters of this idea who continue to push it enthusiastically:
"An Indonesian Tribe’s Language Gets an Alphabet: Korea’s
The Cia-Cia language has been passed down orally for centuries. Now the tribe’s children are learning to write it in Hangul, the Korean script." By Muktita Suhartono, NYT (Nov. 4, 2024)
These fourth graders are not studying the Korean language. They are using Hangul to write and learn theirs:
Cia-Cia, an indigenous language that has no script. It has survived orally for centuries in Indonesia, and is now spoken by about 93,000 people in the Cia-Cia tribe on Buton Island, southeast of the peninsula of Sulawesi Island in Indonesia’s vast archipelago.
Indonesia is home to myriad tribes and cultures, and to more than 700 native languages. It is the most linguistically diverse nation in the world after neighboring Papua New Guinea [839 known languages). On Buton Island alone, there are a handful of local languages and almost two dozen dialects. However, most of them are at risk of disappearing because they do not have a script.
I wonder if that is a fair statement to make. Does a language need to have a written language to survive?
A former mayor of Baubau, where this experiment is being carried out, says: “Language shows the civilization of a tribe, and a language without its own alphabet loses its authenticity.” Again, I ask, is that a fair statement to make?
Conservationists initially tried using Arabic script for Cia-Cia because the syllable-timed language, unlike Indonesia’s national language, could not be easily transliterated into the Roman alphabet. On Buton, most people speak the Wolio dialect, which has been written in the Arabic alphabet since the 1500s. But Arabic turned out to be unsuitable for Cia-Cia, which has more in common with Korean.
In 2009, Hangul was introduced as a script for Cia-Cia after a visit by South Korean academics. Two instructors were sent from Baubau to South Korea to learn Hangul and develop a method for using it to teach Cia-Cia.
Abidin, a native Cia-Cia speaker who like many Indonesians goes by a single name, was one of them. He spent six months at Seoul National University and is considered the pioneer of transcribing Cia-Cia into Hangul.
“After I learned Hangul, I found that there are certain Cia-Cia tones and pronunciations that could be denoted by Hangul characters. It’s not exactly the same but it’s really close,” Mr. Abidin said.
The experiment is not without its detractors:
Some critics have raised concerns about the use of Hangul, saying it could lead to cultural domination or distort the community’s identity. But others argue that the international mix could benefit the preservation process.
Furthermore, the effort to implement Hangul writing for Cia-Cia has not been smooth:
Seoul National University has tried for several years to promulgate Hangul — which was developed by a Korean king, Sejong, in the 1400s — as a script for languages without a writing system. Cia-Cia has been its only success.
Even that program, under which elementary to high school students were taught Hangul, was shelved in Baubau for a decade because of a lack of teachers, among other issues. It found new momentum after a Cia-Cia dictionary was published in 2020, which uses Hangul characters and gives a translation of the word into Bahasa Indonesia, the national language.
I presume that the Bahasa Indonesia translations are written in the Latin alphabet, which is also used for street signs and for other purposes. So Hangul usage for Cia-Cia is ironically somewhat dependent on Latin script.
It should be phonologically testable whether there is empirical evidence indicating that Hangul is better suited than Latin script for writing Cia-Cia. Don't forget that Arabic script was also tried and found wanting, while the national script in Indonesia is Latin, many of the regional languages of Southeast Asia are based on the Latin alphabet, and Hangul for Cia-Cia itself is partially dependent on the Latin script for support, as shown in the previous paragraph.
A few basic facts
Overall, the idea that Hangul will work well for Cia-Cia and other non-Koreanic languages of Southeast Asia is a quirkish manifestation of politico-culturally motivated language reform.
Selected readings
- "Cha-cha Cia-cia: the last dance" (10/8/12)
- "The Hangeul Alphabet Moves beyond the Korean Peninsula" (8/6/09)
- "Hangeul for Cia-Cia, part II" (12/24/09)
- "Hangeul for Cia-Cia, part III" (10/7/10)
- "Hangeul for Cia-Cia, part IV" (1/5/24)
- "Bahasa and the concept of 'National Language'" (3/14/13) — with a lengthy bibliography
- "Hangul: Joseon subservience to Ming China" (5/14/22)
- "A Dartmouth grad's contribution to the development of Hangul" (6/25/15)
- "The pragmatic and innovative Choe Sejin — 15th-16th c. Korean phonetician, translator, and interpreter" (4/21/22)
- "The linguistic plenitude of Papua New Guinea" (12/29/23)
[Thanks to Don Keyser]
Philip Taylor said,
November 5, 2024 @ 1:56 pm
"the idea that Hangul will work well for Cia-Cia and other non-Koreanic languages of Southeast Asia is a quirkish manifestation of politico-culturally motivated language reform" — would you therefore agree that "the idea that the Latin script will work well for Cia-Cia and other non-Koreanic languages of Southeast Asia is a also quirkish manifestation of politico-culturally motivated language reform", Victor, and if not, why not ?
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
November 5, 2024 @ 2:44 pm
Seems to me that the best candidate for an _imported_ script would be one that could be read the fastest and easiest, and would have a more-or-less one-to-one phoneme-transcription correspondence, no? Or am I missing something here?
Lars said,
November 5, 2024 @ 4:31 pm
I wonder why the Latin alphabet should be less suited to a syllable-timed language. Plenty of syllable-timed languages are written with it!
Milan said,
November 5, 2024 @ 9:03 pm
@Philip Taylor,
The Latin script has been adapted for languages for which it is objectively quite badly suited since before the year 1000. So at least there's an enormous collection of special characters and diacritics available, which nowadays can be readily printed and represented digitally.
Chas Belov said,
November 5, 2024 @ 9:42 pm
One could probably make a good argument that the Latin script isn't quite suited to English, although that could also possibly be remedied with a few new or returned letters or diacritics.
CCH said,
November 5, 2024 @ 11:11 pm
I do think a language needs to be written to survive (and/or thrive) in the modern world. There is so much that is written now: websites, operating systems, apps, subtitles, etc. If a person can't use these things in their native language, they will learn a new one which has these now-important things available. It might replace their usage of their native language, and if they have children, they might not pass their language on as the other language is more useful and offers more opportunities. In this case, plenty of modern technology is available in Bahasa Indonesia, but as Cia Cia lacks a written version that is used in apps, websites, etc. they're more likely to just use Bahasa Indonesia as modern technology is more useful than Cia Cia in this instance.
I think previously a language could survive without a written version, but I think that nowadays it's just not really feasible in the same way. If Cia Cia speakers have smartphones and internet access, then yes, a lack of a script is a threat in my opinion.
Hans Adler said,
November 6, 2024 @ 9:10 am
Whether Hangul is better suited for the language than Latin or not. I guess what really matters is that is suited for it. Then by adopting Hangul, the Cia-Cia speakers will basically adopt a step sister languange. Koreans will be intrigued by the news, and this could open up some opportunities for Cia-Cia speakers. But the real motivation is probably that Hangul is particularly easy to learn for children and very visually distinct from the Latin alphabet, which is used by the surrounding majority culture. Presumably these are important factors in actually implementing its adoption, and then using it to preserve the language.
KWillets said,
November 6, 2024 @ 12:17 pm
The Wiki page for the language has both Latin and Hangul mappings; I would say it's not a tight fit as a number of new symbols had to be introduced, and existing ones were given new pronunciations. Allophones such as l/r and v/b are split in Cia-Cia and given unusual Hangul symbols (ᄙ appears to be new, and ㅸ is archaic).
Julian said,
November 6, 2024 @ 5:46 pm
Depends what you mean by 'suitable'.
There's no law of nature that says that a writing system needs to correspond to the phonetics/phonology in a logical way.
A reader wants the signs to jog their memory of the phonetic word without ambiguity. If a number of signs map onto one sound, that doesn't really matter. If one sign can map onto a number of sounds, that might matter – or it might not, if there are enough other clues to resolve any ambiguity.*
And vice versa for the writer.
In the information here https://www.omniglot.com/writing/ciacia.htm
I see nothing that suggests that Latin is any more or less suitable for rendering Cia Cia than Hangul. The Latin alphabet has the obvious advantage that once you have it under your belt you're better placed to learn the many other languages that use it.
As to the point about it being a syllable timed language – the points above apply. There's no law that says the writing system ought to show that. It depends on whether any ambiguity in the mapping could arise.**
* For example, the English digraphs sh, th, ch can be ambiguous ('dosshouse', 'hothouse'), but it's rare, since those old English monks who were inventing a writing system for their language deliberately chose digraphs whose elements would rarely appear side by side with their separate values.
** Consider that English gets on just fine without marking stressed syllables. It's a hassle for second language learners of course, but no problem for native speakers.
Julian said,
November 6, 2024 @ 6:03 pm
A bit off thread, but good for a laugh:
In writing the above comment, I asked ChatGPT:
"Please provide three examples of English words where the letter string 'th' represents a sounded 't' as in 'tap' followed by a sounded 'h' as in 'hat'; that is, examples where 'th' does not represent the single sound 'th' as in 'thick'.
Stripping off the mandatory 100 words of throat-clearing waffle that accompanies ChaptGPT answers,** it provided:
Catherine, bathers, thorough.
For the same question about 'sh', it provided:
ashes, fish-hook, bush-house
For the same question about 'ch', it provided:
archbishop, chemistry, chorus.
A sample of the explanatory comments:
"Archbishop (/ˌɑːrkˈbɪʃ.əp/): In this word, "ch" is pronounced as a "k" sound followed by an "h" sound. So, it's pronounced like "ark-bish-uhp," not like "ch" in "chip."
** Me: 'Mate, I know you're not a sentient being. I'm not going to give you a high distinction, I'm not going to put you on my Christmas card list. So you don't need to show off to me, right? Just gimme the answer!"
KIRINPUTRA said,
November 7, 2024 @ 6:44 am
A language def. doesn't need to be written to survive — but things get dicey real quick if a community becomes literate en masse in one other language (i.e. gains shared literacy in another language).
In the long run, communities that don't share a written language also seem to get their lunch money stolen by communities that do. Or worse.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
November 7, 2024 @ 8:35 am
Kirinputra makes a good point. On top of which, a thousand years ago, when more-or-less _everybody_ lived in an oral culture, you could get away with not bothering to ever put pen to parchment. But, you also were likely to have a socially-determined channel for passing on oral history and literature and probably had a fairly encyclopedic memory to boot. Once the Cia-cia discover "smartphones", they'll be just as stultifyingly monadic as the rest of us.
David Marjanović said,
November 9, 2024 @ 12:24 pm
Not remotely.
The monks who first squeezed Old English into Latin letters used sc instead of sh, for what were at the time straightforward grammatical reasons, c alone instead of ch because the distinction was mostly (!) obvious from the surrounding vowels, and instead of th they imported the rune þ wholesale (…while also importing the freshly created letter đ ~ ð from the continent for the same phoneme (a single phoneme at the time).
Later, c in this function was replaced by ch simply because that's how it was spelled in French, and sc was extended to sch by analogy. (Chaucer used it, for example.) Next, þ and đ fell out of fashion because the Dutch couldn't print them. Eventually, the ungainly sch was simplified to sh, something we're still waiting for in German.
Do read the footnote:
"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. The final /l/ is written with a single letter ㄹ; for the final consonant /r/, the null vowel (ㅡ) is added. Null consonant and vowel letters (으) are added for initial /l/.[citation needed]"
In other words, tolu "3" is spelled 똘루, tol-lu. This is actually how Korean itself does it.
Julian said,
November 10, 2024 @ 6:25 pm
@David Marjanović
Apologies, I stand corrected, as I would have realised with a little more thought. Example of blogging too late at night.