Qualla: The Language That Borrowed an Alphabet from Across the Sea

The Language That Borrowed an Alphabet from Across the Sea: Introduction

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bamboofirdaus, CC0. The word for "no" in Cia-Cia is cia. Say it twice and you have the name of a language, a people, and one of the strangest linguistic experiments of the twenty-first century. Cia-Cia is an Austronesian language spoken by roughly 105,000 people around the city of Baubau, on the southern tip of Buton Island off the coast of Sulawesi. It had no widely adopted writing system of its own -- the Latin alphabet served, but imperfectly, struggling to capture the language's prenasalized consonants and precise vowel distinctions. Then, in 2008, Korean characters began appearing on schoolroom chalkboards in Baubau. Hangul, the alphabet invented in the fifteenth century by King Sejong of Korea to make literacy accessible to common people, had traveled 5,000 kilometers to do exactly that again.

Image: Bamboofirdaus | CC0

The Language That Borrowed an Alphabet from Across the Sea: A Daughter's Inheritance

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bamboofirdaus, CC0. The story of how Korean letters reached a small Indonesian island begins with Lee Ki-nam and her father. During the Japanese colonial occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945, teaching Hangul was at times a punishable act. Lee's father, a linguist, was dismissed from his teaching po...

Image: Bamboofirdaus | CC0

The Language That Borrowed an Alphabet from Across the Sea: Fifty Third-Graders and a New Alphabet

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bamboofirdaus, CC0. In July 2008, Lee led a delegation to Baubau to propose the idea. She offered to build a $500,000 Korean cultural center and establish economic ties between Baubau and South Korea. The city accepted. Two local teachers traveled to Seoul for six months of Hangul training at Seoul ...

Image: Bamboofirdaus | CC0

The Language That Borrowed an Alphabet from Across the Sea: The Alphabet's Rough Passage

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bamboofirdaus, CC0. By 2011, tensions had surfaced between the city of Baubau, the Hunminjeongeum Society that had championed the project, and the Seoul Metropolitan Government. The King Sejong Institute, established in Baubau in 2011 to teach Hangul to local residents, abandoned its offices after j...

Image: Bamboofirdaus | CC0

The Language That Borrowed an Alphabet from Across the Sea: What Cia-Cia Sounds Like on Paper

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bamboofirdaus, CC0. Hangul works for Cia-Cia in ways that Latin script does not. The language uses only open syllables -- each syllable ends in a vowel, following a simple consonant-vowel pattern. Hangul's modular design, where consonant and vowel symbols combine into syllable blocks, maps cleanly o...

Image: Bamboofirdaus | CC0