Languages going extinct are just like animals going extinct, scientists always say that a species becoming extinct is a huge loss for science because each species that we discover gives us information about the evolutionary process. Well, languages are like that too. Each language tells us a story about (those groups of) people's cultures, lifestyles, beliefs, societal rules, taboos, and also about their past. For example, the amount of words that Turkish has for family members tells us that Turkish culture is based on family bonds and not individuality. Also, we can put these languages into language families based on common words and grammatical structures. For instance, Turkish is an agglutinative language which means it creates concepts like past, future, plurality, and dative via suffixes and not by using extra words like by, for, to, from, through, will be, etc. By knowing these pieces of information we can link Turkish to Finnish, Korean, Estonian, Uzbek, Azerbaijani, and more. Briefly, languages can give a lot of information to linguists that's why a language being lost is like a confidential file getting caught on fire.
This used to be the case for Cia-Cia which is an endangered language spoken in the southeast of Sulawesi Island, in Indonesia. Cia-Cia is spoken mainly on Buton Island, around the city of Baubau by just 80.000 people. There were 2 main reasons for this language going extinct. The first reason is that Indonesia's government is trying to form a lingua franca (common language) within its islands, they have over 200 islands and almost each of them has its own language or several languages. Thus, they are trying to standardize Bahasa Indonesia which is spoken around the capital and uses the Latin script which is easy to learn. However, some Indonesians who have a different first language don't like this because they feel like their people and culture are being swallowed up by the central government. They want more regional differentiation. So, some of the languages started to be written using the Arabic script which they have historical ties with in order to conserve local identity. But Cia-Cia has a different situation which brings us to reason 2: it has no written script! Yes, they didn't use to have a written version of the language and this made it fade very quickly without the kids being able to learn it at school. They thought adopting the Latin script would kind of assimilate them and the Arabic script would be just too hard to learn. Hence, they decided to use the Korean alphabet. This alphabet is so simple that I learned it in just 2 hours. It only has 24 letters and letters are never silent unlike "knight" or "psychology". The Korean script was really suitable for the phonology of the language and they only needed to make subtle changes.
The Cia Cia language written in Hangul:
But overall, how did this happen? Since the language didn't have a written version most children found it hard and kind of unnecessary to learn also, people were afraid to use it in formal settings because of its inconvenience. In conclusion, they mostly used Cia-Cia at home and depended on either English or Bahasa Indonesia for education and business. Until a group of Korean ambassadors visited the country and suggested they use their alphabet. After further investigation, they found out that Hangul (the Korean alphabet) was phonetically suitable for the Cia-Cia language. So, some local experts went to South Korea and studied Hangul for a couple of years. When they came back they started to adapt the alphabet for their language so they created a dictionary that explained the alphabet after the adaptations and used words and sentences as examples of how they would be written in Hangul. In 2009, they started teaching Butonese kids their own language via Hangul and put up street signs in Hangul. And you know what? It worked! The children can learn their language easily and adults are now more confident at using their first language in formal settings. The language was prevented from fading away and was given a written script.
Finally, I want to talk about the subtle changes I mentioned earlier. Hangul doesn't have a distinction between L and R, they are both represented with ㄹ. So they decided to use this letter only for R and use ᄙ for L instead. Also, Korean doesn't have a V sound but Cia-Cia has so they put a circle under the letter B to create a V representation: B=ㅂ and V=ㅸ. Lastly, ㅋ in Korean represents a very hard K but Cia-Cia doesn't have that sound so they repurposed it to mean ʁ, also known as the French R.