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 The
Korean alphabet, called
Hangul internationally, was invented in the 15th century by the Korean king
Sejong the Great. The writing system has since received significant praise from international linguists and is now considered a point of pride for Koreans. South Korean linguists have been attempting to spread the script outside of Korea, particularly to languages that do not yet have their own writing systems. In the 1990s, a Hangul-based alphabet was devised for the
Lahu language of China and Southeast Asia, but this did not see significant adoption.
Lee Ki-nam (), whose father was a linguist, became a significant force in advocating for Hangul's use for Cia-Cia. During the 1910–1945
Japanese colonial period in Korea, teaching Hangul was at times persecuted; the elder Lee was once dismissed from a teaching position for secretly teaching it to his students. Around the 1990s, after retiring from her career, Lee Ki-nam began to do
missionary and charitable work, and she developed an interest in spreading Hangul to ethnic groups with languages that did not already have well-established writing systems. Two teachers representing two language groups in Baubau went to Seoul for a six-month training course in Hangul at SNU. One of them quit, but the other returned to Baubau in July 2009 to begin teaching Hangul to 50 third-graders. 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. In January 2020, the publication of the first Cia-Cia dictionary in Hangul was announced; it was published in December 2021. This renewed interest in Hangul for Cia-Cia, and the King Sejong Institute reopened its offices in Baubau in 2022. In December 2023,
Agence France-Presse again published an article with interviews showcasing the Hangul effort. As of 2025, Cia-Cia's use of Hangul remains limited to schools and local signs in the two subdistricts that originally adopted the program. ==Examples==