In an eastern Indonesian village, schoolchildren scrawl the distinctive circles and lines of Hangul script on a whiteboard, but the language they are learning is not Korean. It is their own Indigenous Cia-Cia tongue.
The language of the Cia-Cia ethnic group in southeast Sulawesi province's Baubau has no written form, and the syllable-based tongue does not readily translate to the Latin alphabet often used to transcribe Indonesia's national language.
But the Korean Hangul script, developed in the 15th century, shares a syllable-based system that has made it an unusual tool in the effort to preserve and transmit the language of the approximately 80,000 Cia-Cia people.