Lee started trying to spread Hangul in 2003. She first tried relying on Korean Christian missionaries in Nepal, Mongolia, Vietnam and China. But because the missionaries’ primary concern was religious, not linguistic, she said, none of those programs succeeded.
She later began working with linguists in South Korea, and by 2007 they had an ally. South Korean popular culture — soap operas, music, pop stars — had mesmerized much of Asia.
People like the Cia-Cia, a minority of 60,000 people in Indonesia, were eager to embrace things Korean, according to a Korean documentary shot on their island.
In July last year, Lee led a delegation to Baubau, a town on Buton Island, off southeastern Sulawesi. In meetings with officials and tribal chieftains, she offered to create writing systems and textbooks based on Hangul so they could teach their children their own languages in school. She also offered to build a US$500,000 Korean cultural center and promote economic development.
A deal was signed. Two teachers representing two language groups in Baubau came to Seoul for a six-month training course in Hangul at Seoul National University. One quit, complaining about the cold weather. The other, a Cia-Cia man named Abidin, stayed on. In July, Abidin, using a textbook from South Korea, began teaching the Cia-Cia language, written in Hangul, to 50 third graders in Baubau.
Although Indonesia’s government has not interfered in the Hangul project, Dammen said he feared that the rest of Baubau’s 16 tribes might become jealous of the “special treatment” the Koreans were giving the Cia-Cia.
“If others say, ‘Oh, we can also invite Japan, we can invite Russia, we can invite India, we can invite China, even Arabs,’ then things become messy,” he said.
For Lee, meanwhile, the program for the Cia-Cia is just the beginning of her ambitions for Hangul.
By sharing the script with others, Lee said, she is simply expressing the will of her ancestor King Sejong, who promulgated the script. (She is a direct descendant, 21 generations removed.)
The national holiday, Hangul Day, on Oct. 9, celebrates the king’s introduction of the script in 1446. Before that, Koreans had no writing system of their own. The elite studied Chinese characters to record the meaning, but not the sound, of Korean.
“Many of my illiterate subjects who want to communicate cannot express their concerns,” the king is recorded to have said in explaining the reason for Hunminjeongeum, the original name for Hangul. “I feel sorry for them. Therefore I have created 28 letters.”
“The king propagated Hangul out of love of his people,” Lee said. “It’s time for Koreans to expand his love for mankind by propagating Hangul globally. This is an era of globalization.”
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