Cia-Cia

Cia-Cia (Bahasa Ciacia, also South Buton) is an Austronesian language of the Muna-Buton subgroup, spoken by roughly 80,000–105,000 people around the city of Baubau on southern Buton Island in Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia. Phonologically it is typical of the region: five vowels, a phonemic glottal stop (written with an apostrophe, as in ka'ana 'house' and we'e 'water'), a series of prenasalized stops, and the implosives /ɓ/ and /ɗ/ that ordinary Latin spelling under-transcribes as plain b and d. The language became internationally famous in 2009, when Baubau began teaching it in the Korean Hangul script — reviving obsolete jamo such as ᄫ for the bilabial fricative Korean lacks. That project has always been far smaller than its fame: Hangul is used in the schools and street signs of a couple of subdistricts, never officially adopted, and the overwhelming majority of Cia-Cia writing is still Latin. Most speakers are bilingual in Indonesian and many also use the closely related Wolio.