Regional Variation in Indonesian

Note: This talk has not gone through a process of peer review, and findings should therefore be treated as preliminary and subject to change.

SOAS Linguistics Webinars
Summer 2020
August 4

Yanti (Universitas Katolik Indonesia Atma Jaya)
& Asako Shiohara (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies)

Indonesia is home to more than 600 indigenous languages; however, because of the recent social change, more and more younger people learn Indonesian, the national language, as their first language. While a decline of indigenous languages occurs, new urban varieties, which inherit the features of indigenous languages, are emerging in large cities. This talk describes the linguistic features observed in such urban varieties and discusses how people’s identities are reflected in the use of these varieties. This talk is based on the data in a semi-parallel corpus we built using a picture task.