Today the script is taught in South Sulawesi Province as part of the local curriculum, but with very limited usage in everyday life.

[3] The term Lontara has also come to refer to literature regarding Bugis history and genealogy, an important subject in traditional South Sulawesi societies.

It is worth noting that R.A. Kern (1939:580-3) writes that modified curved letters in the Lontara script one finds written on paper do not appear to have been used in the palm-leaf Bugis manuscripts he examined.

The Toraja people who also reside in south Sulawesi do not use the script as their literary tradition is primarily oral based, without an indigenous written form.

[11] In historical South Sulawesi cultural sphere, the Lontara script was used in a number of related text traditions, most of which are written in manuscripts.

The term lontara also refers to a literary genre that deals with history and genealogies, the most widely written and important writing topics by the Buginese and neighboring Makassar people.

[13][14] Even so, such historical records are still susceptible to political meddling as a mean of ratifying power, descent, and territorial claims of ambitious rulers.

This is a long work composed of pentametric verses which relates the story of humanity's origins but also serves as practical everyday almanac.

[19] Lontara script is also frequently found in Islamic themed texts such as hikayat (romance), prayer guide, azimat (talisman), tafsir (exegesis), and fiqh (jurisprudence).

To paraphrase Tol (2015), the impression that these publications make on present readers, with their old-fashioned techniques, unattractive manufacture, and general sloppiness, is that they are very much something of the past.

[21] In contemporary context, the Lontara script has been part of the local curriculum in South Sulawesi since the 1980s, and may be found infrequently in public signage.

However, anecdotal evidence suggest that current teaching methods as well as limited and monotonous reading materials has in fact been counter productive in raising the script's literacy among younger generation.

South Sulawesi youth are generally aware of the script's existence and may recognize a few letters, but it is rare for someone to able to read and write Lontara in a substantial manner.

After he was allowed to open the manuscript in order to check its content, it turned out to be a purchase receipt of a horse (presumably long dead by the time).

[26] Given that Lontara script is also traditionally written without word breaks, a typical text often has many ambiguous portions which can often only be disambiguated through context.

There are five diacritics, shown below:[32] As mentioned previously, Lontara script traditionally does not have any device to indicate syllable codas, except anca’ in some circumstances.

[36] Users from Bugis-Makassar regions only experimented with novel coda diacritics in the early 21st century, at a time when the use of Lontara has significantly declined.

Other Bugis experts such as Nurhayati Rahman view such proposals negatively, arguing that they are often too disruptive or promoted based on simplistic and misleading premises that the so called "defectiveness" of Lontara need to be "completed" by conforming to Latin orthographical norms.

Such proposals shows more of an inferiority complex that would alienate actual cultural practice and heritage from contemporary users, rather than preserve them.

[37] As of 2018, proposals of Lontara coda diacritics do not have official status or general consensus, with disparate sources prescribing different schemes.

[40] Traditional Lontara texts are written without spaces (scriptio continua) and only use two punctuation marks, the pallawa (or passimbang in Makassar) and an end of section marker.

An end of section marker is seen in some traditional texts and is attested in Bugis specimen sheets produced by the Imprimerie Nationale.

Similar system of cipher was also recorded in South Asian regions spanning modern Pakistan and Afghanistan, which may have inspired Lontara Bilang-bilang.

This is an episode telling the descend of tomanurung, a legendary figure whose appearance marks the beginning of South Sulawesi historical kingdoms in traditional accounts.