The Lontara script is some sort of moon speak traditionally used for the Bugis language, Makassarese language, and Mandar language

Mandar language

Mandar is an Austronesian language spoken by the group ethnic Mandar living in West Sulawesi province, Indonesia, especially in the sea side regencies like - Majene and Polewali-Mandar as well as few settlements in the islands of Pangkep District also known as Spermonde Archipelago and Ujung Lero,...

s of Sulawesi

Sulawesi

Sulawesi is one of the four larger Sunda Islands of Indonesia and is situated between Borneo and the Maluku Islands. In Indonesia, only Sumatra, Borneo, and Papua are larger in territory, and only Java and Sumatra have larger Indonesian populations.- Etymology :The Portuguese were the first to...

 in modern Indonesia

Indonesia

Indonesia , officially the Republic of Indonesia , is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is an archipelago comprising approximately 13,000 islands. It has 33 provinces with over 238 million people, and is the world's fourth most populous country. Indonesia is a republic, with an...

. It is also known as the Buginese script. It was largely replaced by the Latin alphabet

Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...

 during the period of Dutch colonization. The term Lontara is derived from the Malay name for palmyra palm, Lontar, whose leaves are traditionally used for manuscripts. In Buginese, this script is called urupu sulapa eppa which means "four-corner letters".

Usage

Although the Latin alphabet has largely replaced Lontara, it is still used to a limited extent in Bugis and Makasar. In Bugis, its usage is limited to ceremonial purposes, such as wedding ceremonies. Lontara is also used extensively in printing traditional Buginese literature. In Makasar, Lontara is additionally used for personal documents such as letters and notes. Those who are skilled in writing the script are known as palontara, 'writing specialists'. Historically, Lontara was used for a wide range of documents including contracts, trade laws, treaties, and maps. The term lontara

Lontara

Lontara or lontaraq are Bugis palm-leaf manuscripts that record knowledge on such topics as history, science, custom, and laws. The term originates from the Javanese/Malay word lontar, which is the type of tree that provides the leaves used....

 has also come to refer to literature regarding Bugis

Bugis

The Bugis are the most numerous of the three major linguistic and ethnic groups of South Sulawesi, the southwestern province of Sulawesi, Indonesia's third largest island. Although many Bugis live in the large port cities of Makassar and Parepare, the majority are farmers who grow wet rice on the...

 history and genealogy.

Phonology

Phonetic table of Lontara consonants

	Voicing Voice (phonetics) Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds, with sounds described as either voiceless or voiced. The term, however, is used to refer to two separate concepts. Voicing can refer to the articulatory process in which the vocal cords vibrate...	Labial Labial consonant Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. This precludes linguolabials, in which the tip of the tongue reaches for the posterior side of the upper lip and which are considered coronals...		Dental		Palatal		Velar		Glottal Glottal consonant Glottal consonants, also called laryngeal consonants, are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider...
Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :...	voiced	[m]	ᨆ	[n]	ᨊ	[ɲ]	ᨎ	[ŋ]	ᨂ
Prenasalized cluster Consonant cluster In linguistics, a consonant cluster is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word splits....		[mp]	ᨇ	[nr]	ᨋ	[ɲc]	ᨏ	[ŋk]	ᨃ
Stop Stop consonant In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oral stop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be done with the tongue , lips , and &...  & affricate	voiced	[b]	ᨅ	[d]	ᨉ	[ɟ]	ᨍ	[g]	ᨁ
	unvoiced	[p]	ᨄ	[t]	ᨈ	[c]	ᨌ	[k]	ᨀ	[ʔ]	*
Fricative				[s]	ᨔ					[h]	ᨖ
Rhotic Rhotic consonant In phonetics, rhotic consonants, also called tremulants or "R-like" sounds, are liquid consonants that are traditionally represented orthographically by symbols derived from the Greek letter rho, including "R, r" from the Roman alphabet and "Р, p" from the Cyrillic alphabet...				[r]	ᨑ
Approximant		[w]	ᨓ	[l]	ᨒ	[j]	ᨐ

* /ʔ/ only occurs finally, and is therefore not written.

Naming

The script is divided into two groups, the indo’ surə’ or ina’ surə’ (literally 'main letters') and ana’ surə’ (literally 'child letters'). The indo’ surə’ are the consonants of the script while ana’ surə’ are diacritic

Diacritic

A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave are often called accents...

 vowel marks which are also divided into two subsets, dots (tətti’) and accents (kəccə’).

Support of the script in Unicode

Buginese was added to the Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

Standard in March, 2005 with the release of version 4.1.

The Unicode block for Buginese is U+1A00 ... U+1A1F. Grey areas indicate non-assigned code points.

External links

• Lontara and Makasar scripts
• Article about Buginese script in JSTOR
• Buginese script on www.ancientscripts.com
• Saweri, a font that supports only lontara script. (This font is Truetype-only, and will not properly reorder the prepended vowel /e/ to the left without the help of a compliant text-layout engine, still missing)
• Revised final proposal for encoding the Lontara (Buginese) script in the UCS, by Michael Everson (2003). Detailed description of the graphical features of the script, needed in conforming fonts (including a ligature), submitted to the ISO TC2 and Unicode working committee prior to the final encoding of the Bugis/Lontara script in the UCS. Note that this document describes a few other characters that were not encoded in the final release of Unicode 4.1 where the script was encoded (notably a vowel killer or virama, found in some transcriptions to disambiguate the script, a diacritic for annotating the gemination of consonants, an anusvara sign for noting the vowelless ng, and a few other punctuation symbols).