The Indonesian government has approved a minority tribe's adoption of the Korean alphabet as its official writing system to transcribe its fading spoken language, officials said Monday.
The Cia-Cia, a tribe of some 80,000 people living in the city of Bau-Bau, located on Buton island in southeast Sulawesi, selected the Korean alphabet, called "Hangeul," to preserve its fading language last August. It has since offered a Korean language course in elementary schools.
"The government has finally allowed the Cia-Cia to use Hangeul as its official writing system through meetings with related agencies," Amirul Tamim, mayor of Bau-Bau, said in an interview with Yonhap News Agency.
Despite concerns over cultural influence from overseas, the Indonesian government finally decided to recognize Hangeul as an official writing system to preserve the minority language at risk of extinction.
While there are currently only two Korean language teachers dispatched for the Cia-Cia tribe, the city will start a training course next month to train 30 local teachers to eventually teach Hangeul to the tribe's young students.
"If the number of Korean language teachers increases, it will lay the ground work for other minority tribes to use the Korean alphabet," Tamim
said.
He also said the city is ready to send teachers to Korea for training if the government or private groups provide support for exchange programs.
The Hunminjeongeum Society in Seoul is considering dispatching more volunteers to the Indonesian city to help spread the new writing system, officials said.
Hangeul, a phonetic alphabet created by the Korean King Sejong about 600 years ago, can theoretically be used to write words in almost any language. The academic institute has run the project to help illiterate minority tribes write their languages and preserve them.