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This book is the product of a collective intellectual exploration and a shared interest in the language practices of young people in Indonesia. Through numerous meetings, both face-to-face and via Skype, we have discussed and debated different theoretical concepts as well as the many examples that appear in this book. Though the three of us have known each other for some years, writing a book together has afforded us the opportunity to appreciate the differences in our academic background and interest and given us the courage to meet the challenge of aligning differing analytical perspectives in order to provide a rich account of the multi-situated nature of language use. Meeting that challenge was not always easy but was always a fruitful process. When we embarked on this project, we knew that examining youth language practices would be a satisfying endeavour. We are very grateful to the young participants in Bandung and Malang for allowing us to record their conversations, and to authors of Teenlit in Jakarta, Bandung, Yogyakarta and Surabaya for granting us interviews. Editors of Teenlit at Gramedia Pustaka Utama and Gema Insani in Jakarta, and Mizan in Bandung have been particularly welcoming. We also thank Simon Chandra of Cendana Art Media Publishers, Sheila Rooswitha Putri and Ronny Amdani of Curhat Anak Bangsa Publishers for kindly granted us permission to reproduce the comic work presented here. We owe a debt of gratitude to our research assistants, who dedicated many hours to transcription and annotation, and helped us with the occasional tricky teen word or youth cultural reference: Eliyana, Refdinal Hadiningrat, Asdit Leonitara, Linda Mayasari, Harni Kartika Ningsih and Catrine Ana Prastyari. Particular gratitude is due to Enung Rostika, who led the collection and transcription effort in Bandung, and Catur Siwi Dia Rachmatika, who did the same in Malang. Our sincere thanks also go to Jo Taylor whose keen editorial eye efficiently refined this manuscript in its closing days. Our respective institutions have provided study leave to enable us to work on this project and financial support in the form of travel grants, research assistant funding and editing assistance. We are grateful for the generous support provided by the University of Sydney (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences),

The last few years have seen a boom in the publication of teen fiction in Indonesia. Particularly since the publication of the highly successful novel Eiffel ... I’m in love (Arunita 2001), numerous fiction works targeted at a youthful readership have appeared. This genre of popular literature has been so successful in attracting its audience that it currently constitutes the largest growing market in the Indonesian publishing industry (Simamora 2005). One of its striking characteristics is the predominant use of colloquial Indonesian, an informal variety of Indonesian that is closely identified with speakers from the capital Jakarta, particularly young people. Over a decade ago, scholars noted the increasing use of colloquial Indonesian in popular literature (see for example Adelaar and Prentice 1996:678). The implication is that this language variety has spread into domains previously dominated by standard Indonesian, the formal variety used in government administration, formal education, and most printed mass media. Indeed, contemporary Indonesian written literature is largely associated with standard Indonesian, such that the increasing use of colloquial Indonesian in popular literature has invited much criticism from language gatekeepers. Despite such criticism, however, teen fiction continues to flourish. The increasing use of colloquial Indonesian in teen fiction, though noted by scholars, has not been subject to any detailed linguistic study. Linguistic studies of colloquial Indonesian – at least those published in English – have focused so far on its use in speech, or in written texts intended to resemble speech, such as internet chatting and advice columns for young people. Prior to the recent surge in teen fiction, use of colloquial Indonesian in contemporary written literature was largely limited to dialogues. Writers such as Putu Wijaya, for example, are known to incorporate colloquialism to render dialogues more natural (Rafferty 1990:107). Teen fiction writers have extended the use of colloquialism into other parts of fiction such as the description of characters, settings, and inner thoughts. This development makes it interesting to look for a way to describe the increase of colloquialism. A useful approach is to examine the usage patterns of a term or a selection of terms in a number of teen fiction works published over time, with the purpose of observing changes in the patterns, and whether such changes can be shown to represent greater colloquialism. This study is a preliminary attempt in that direction. My purpose here is to demonstrate that in the last two decades during which colloquial Indonesian has been employed in teen fiction, there has been a shift in writing style from one that bears greater resemblance to standard Indonesian towards a style that is more colloquial. The term ‘style’ is commonly employed in sociolinguistics to refer to ways of speaking, which Bell (2001:139) defines in terms of the question ‘Why did the speaker say it this way on this occasion?’ (italics in original). Adapting this definition for teen fiction writing, I use ‘writing style’ here to refer to the characteristic manner in which an author writes fiction. This style is observed here by examining the use of the preposition pada ‘to, towards, on, in, at’ as compared to the use of three other prepositions, namely kepada ‘to, towards’, ke ‘to, towards’, and sama ‘to, towards, by, with’. The development towards increased colloquialism is shown through two indicators: a reduction in the range of prepositional meanings of pada along with the assignment of particular discourse functions to kepada, and an increased use of ke and sama. The data are drawn from ten works of fiction published between 1998 and 2005. Eight of these are written by the same author, Hilman. In four of them, Hilman collaborates with fellow writer Boim Lebon. The other two works are by Laire Siwi Mentari and Marthino Andries. This selection is motivated by the following considerations. Hilman’s works have been highly and consistently popular since his first publication appeared in 1986. They span two decades and therefore provide an appropriate time span for examining shifts in writing style. Laire Siwi Mentari and Marthino Andries are also successful writers; their first novels were published in 2004, followed by their second novels in 2005. This study makes use of their second novels.

This article explores new functions served by language varieties in fiction. Focusing our analysis on two types of texts in Indonesian -teen fiction and comics -we examine the interplay between standard and colloquial varieties to show how they are used together with non-verbal elements to promote youthful involvement. We identify three ways in which involvement is created in the texts: through free indirect discourse, non-verbal cues, and the gradual building of empathy indicated by shifting perspectives. We show that shifts from narrator's to character's perspective are shifts in alignment. By shifting to colloquial language, the narrator aligns their perspective with that of both the character and the reader, thus blurring the divisions between them. Nonverbal cues can also signal a shift in narrator roles, from a teller to a keen commentator and interlocutor who directly addresses the reader and invites them to share story-world experience. The frequent shifts between varieties represent a new style of writing which gives salience to the role of narrator as agent with a double persona: an anonymous agent who tells the reader about the characters in relation to the unfolding events, and an agent-participant who makes their presence known to the reader through direct address and evaluative commentary.

Teenlit, a genre of popular literature for adolescents, was introduced to Indonesia around the beginning of the last decade and almost immediately attracted a large readership consisting predominantly of female adolescents. Its rapid rise has invited both favourable and hostile reactions from observers. Sympathetic literary critics view young people's attraction to it as a positive process towards the development of a healthy reading and writing habit. Meanwhile, hostile critics consider it as nothing more than light fiction containing questionable moral values, written in an unacceptable style. This article examines a representative example of such criticisms as a platform for discussing the relationship between the relatively new genre of adolescent literature and the wider context of language change. It seeks to show that hostility towards teenlit reflects a concern for the maintenance of standard Indonesian as the language of literature amid a rapidly changing language situation in which a major colloquial variety of Indonesian has been gaining prominence and encroaching on domains prescriptively associated with the standard variety, such as written literature. The negative reaction is also an assertion of an idealized view of literature, which holds that the function of adolescent fiction is to educate readers on the aesthetic function of language and sound moral values. The author demonstrates that this concern arises against the backdrop of a socio-political climate in which the state, having long exerted control over language use and language development, gradually ceases to be perceived as the sole authority on language. As such, it is an articulation of a desire to safeguard the existence of a linguistic authority.