Phonetic And Phonological Influences Of Javanese On Indonesian

When different peoples come in contact, so do their languages.

During the course of the contact, a linguistic exchange usually takes place. The extent of this reciprocal give-and-take depends on several factors, including time depth, the intensity, and the nature of the interaction.

In cases where languages come in contact with each other, the influence of one language on another is a common phenomenon, and in the use of either language, some linguistic features from the other are manifested. The influence may occur in the domains of phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. The constituents being borrowed may come from a combination of domains. For example, certain lexical items and a set of phrases from Language A may be actively used in Language B; in other cases, certain aspects of a grammatical structure in Language A are adopted in Language B.

At the level of phonetics, speakers may produce the phonetic details of a set of sounds that occur in one language, most likely their native language, when they communicate in another language. At the level of phonology, languages may differ in their phonotactic constraints and speakers may “transfer” the constraints in one language to the other. This borrowing process implies that one language serves as the source or donor language, from which a linguistic constituent is borrowed, and the other as the recipient one, in which a borrowed linguistic constituent is manifested.

According to van Coetsem (1988), which constituents are transferred from which language depends on several factors, such as whether the 2 constituents are part of the least stable or the more stable of the language domain. In addition, the issue of whether the source or the recipient language is either socially and/or linguistically dominant plays a major role in the process. These factors will be discussed further in § 1.1.

A goal in this study is to explore aspects of sound patterns in Indonesian and Javanese that are affected by the contact of the two languages, highlighting the interaction between phonology and phonetics. There are several issues in the investigation of the phonology/phonetics interaction that are relevant here. A central issue is how the discrete units of phonology are mapped onto the continuous units of phonetics. The linguistic influences, phonological patterns in p

Another relevant issue would be identifying whether what is observed in the acoustic data is phonologically relevant or not. This would require one to decide which phenomena are part of phonology and
which are part of phonetics. These issues are further discussed in § 1.2.

There are three phonological phenomena that are investigated here:

1.  Vowel alternation study: the realization of the Javanese vowel alternation in the Indonesian of the bilingual speakers;

2. Voice quality study: the realization of the Javanese breathy/clear contrast in Indonesian by these bilingual speakers;

3. Syllable structure study: the syllabification of root-medial nasal + stop clusters in the Indonesian of the bilingual speakers.

The three issues focused on here are acoustically and phonologically interconnected with each other, in that in order to investigate one, its interaction with the other is crucial. This is further discussed in § 1.8.

For each phenomenon in question, I examine its acoustic realization in Javanese as produced by Javanese native speakers (who are bilingual) and in Indonesian as produced by monolingual Indonesian speakers. The results are then compared with those for the bilingual speakers producing sets of Indonesian forms.