Buginese

Buginese (basa Ugi, ᨅᨔ ᨕᨘᨁᨗ) is the language of the Bugis people of South Sulawesi, Indonesia, with ~5M speakers — a major regional language alongside Makassarese and Toraja. Famed seafarers and shipwrights, the Bugis traded across the Indonesian archipelago and northern Australia (where they gave their name to the Yolŋu word "Macassan" trepang fishermen) for centuries from their kingdoms of Bone, Wajo, Soppeng, and Luwu. Buginese has produced one of the world's longest literary works, La Galigo (~6000 pages), an epic poem in the I La Galigo cycle predating most other world epics in length, inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register (2011). Written traditionally in Lontara (ᨒᨚᨈᨑ), a Brahmi-derived script with 23 consonant signs that does not mark word-final consonants — a unique feature making texts intentionally ambiguous; now widely written in Latin script for modern use.