IndonesianaEncyclopedia of Indonesian Culture
ID EN

Bugis

People Sulawesi Selatan PEO-0007

Maintained

Other and rejected name forms (2)

A rejected form remains searchable so that older sources stay findable, but it is never used in the prose of an entry.

Bugis Primary name
To Ugi Alternate name

A Bugis-speaking people of South Sulawesi, seafarers and traders whose settlements are spread across the waters of the archipelago, and the holders of one of the longest literary corpora in the world, La Galigo.

Seafaring and settlement

From the seventeenth century Bugis parties founded settlements in East Kalimantan, Johor, Selangor, Sumatra and the Lesser Sundas, often as traders and political powers at once. The pinisi vessel, built at Bulukumba by Konjo shipwrights, is its best-known technical form.

Sources 1

The Lontara script

The Lontara script is used to write Bugis and Makassarese. Its name comes from the lontar palm leaf, its original writing material. The script does not write syllable-final consonants, so reading old manuscripts depends on command of the language and not on decipherment alone.

Sources 21

Corrections to this entry

Correction 2025-04-22 · COR-0004

Numerical correction. The page count of the Leiden La Galigo copy was previously given as “about 6,000 pages”. That figure was incorrect and now reads about 2,851 folio pages, citing the holding institution's catalogue.

Keep reading

Text La Galigo A Bugis literary corpus in the Lontara script, held to be among the longest in the world, never complete in any single manuscript… Dormant Sulawesi Selatan Narrative Sawerigading The central figure of La Galigo, a descendant of the upper world whose voyages span much of the corpus, including the prohibition… Attenuated Sulawesi Selatan Language Buginese Written in the Lontara script; its manuscript corpus includes La Galigo. Maintained Melayu-Polinesia