Asia-Pacific Language Variation - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2021

As Indonesian becomes more dominant in Indonesia, regional heritage languages, such as Javanese, may be increasingly influenced by phonological transfer. The extent of these effects may depend upon a speaker’s region and social background, as well as age of acquisition and proficiency in various languages. This study investigates the impact of these factors on the Javanese production among multilingual children in East Java. Specifically, we analyze the distinction between dental and retroflex coronal stops (/t̪/ /d̪̥ /, /ʈ/, /ɖ̥/), which phonemically contrast in Javanese, but not in Indonesian. The data were elicited from 95 children in Malang, a large urban center, and Blitar, a smaller city. The findings indicate that Javanese is shifting to a two-way contrast comparable to that of Indonesian; female and Malang speakers lead in this change. These findings highlight the significance of social factors in children’s language acquisition, and illustrate ongoing changes in Javanese.

This study investigates the variation of pronominal forms in Sasak, an Austronesian language spoken in eastern Indonesia. The study marks the first variationist sociolinguistic work on Sasak. Using data from eight conversations between 15 non-noble speakers, pronominal forms were coded for whether they were realized as a free pronoun or a clitic. Further, the discourse was examined to identify the referents and to observe the pragmatic effect of the forms used. The results show clitics dominate the distribution. Further, the results demonstrate that a higher percentage of clitics are preferred with the basic form for first person referents, but speakers apply a different strategy for second person referents; speakers use first person plural and third person singular forms to address their interlocutor when triggered by a Face Threatening Act (see Brown & Levinson, 1987).

We examine variation in a rural variety of Acehnese spoken in Aceh Province, to better understand the impact of long-term contact with Indonesian and increasing urbanization. The Great Aceh variety is characterized by variable realization of word-final (t) as a dental vs. glottal stop. Analyses of over 2,000 tokens of this variable from a corpus of spontaneous speech from 35 speakers indicate that the variability is relatively stable among men, and among women of high mobility, measured in terms of education, occupation, and time spent outside Great Aceh. Women with low mobility produce the lowest rates of [t̪], and in this group we observe a higher rate of [t̪] by younger than older women, suggesting change over time. We thus find both stability – among those who have long enjoyed high levels of mobility – and change – among those most affected by recent social changes, namely low-mobility women.

Madurese exhibits a three-way laryngeal contrast in its plosive inventory, distinguishing voiced, voiceless unaspirated, and voiceless aspirated plosives. Previous studies have investigated some acoustic characteristics of the contrast but have not examined possible dialectal variation in this contrast. The present study aims to discuss the contrast by examining Voice Onset Time (VOT) and vowel quality (F1). Twenty participants (10 Western Madurese speakers and 10 Eastern Madurese speakers) were recruited and instructed to read 150 Madurese words containing plosives. The results showed that an interaction of dialect and gender were significantly correlated with VOT: male Western Madurese speakers produced shorter VOT for voiced and voiceless aspirated plosives than their Eastern counterparts. There was also variation in F1 between gender across dialects: male Western Madurese speakers produced [ə] with a lower F1 than their Eastern counterparts. It was suggested that the variation was possibly due to language contact with Javanese.

Jakarta Indonesian is a colloquial variety of Indonesian spoken primarily in Indonesia’s capital, where it was originally a contact variety between Betawi, the local variety of Malay, and Standard Indonesian. Like other varieties of Indonesian, Jakarta Indonesian is a language with a relatively open system of pronominal reference and multiple forms for self-reference. In this paper we focus on variation in the use of first-person pronouns in Jakarta Indonesian, using two corpora of spoken data collected three decades apart. We employ both quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the form, function and social meaning of 1sg pronouns in Jakarta Indonesian, investigating both inter- and intra-speaker variation over time.