Cia-Cia, also known as (South) Buton or **Buton**ese, 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

As of 2005, there were 80,000 speakers of Cia-Cia, many of whom also use 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. Cia-Cia has been privately taught to schoolchildren in the Hangul script since 2008. The students are also taught some basic Korean. The program remained active as of 2024.

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 ambigous 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:

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

In 2009, residents of the city of Baubau set about adopting Hangul, the script for the Korean language, to write Cia-Cia. The mayor consulted the Indonesian government on the possibility of making the writing system official. However, 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; it reopened them in 2022. In December 2023, Agence France-Presse again published an article with interviews showcasing the Hangul effort. In January 2020, the publication of the first Cia-Cia dictionary in Hangul was announced. It was published in December 2021. As of 2024, Hangul remains in use in schools and on local signs.

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:

<section begin="list-of-glossing-abbreviations"/> 3R:third person realis 3IR:third person irrealis 3DO:third person direct object 3POS:third person possessive VM:verbal marker <section end="list-of-glossing-abbreviations"/> 아디 세링 빨리 노논또 뗄레ᄫᅵ시. 아마노 노뽀옴바에 이아 나누몬또 뗄레ᄫᅵ시 꼴리에 노몰렝오. Adi sering pali nononto televisi. Amano nopo'ombae ia nanumonto televisi kolie nomolengo. aɗi seriŋ pali nononto teleβisi amano nopoʔomɓa.e i.a nanumonto teleβisi koli.e nomoleŋo. Adi.NOM often very 3R-watch television. Father-3POS 3R-tell-3DO he 3IR-watch television don't 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.

Citations

Sources