Language Shift among Javanese Youth and Their Perception of Local and National Identities

Abstract

It is not uncommon for language to play an important role in identity issues in multilingual countries. Declaring one of the important community languages as the official language in such a country can pose a threat to the survival of the other languages. Bahasa Indonesia is an example of this phenomenon. Its successful establishment as the national language has altered the local language situation throughout the country. Relevant to this study, it has had an important effect on young people's use of Javanese, the dominant local language of Yogyakarta. This study analyses the extent of language shift among the young multilinguals in the city and investigates the youth's search for authentic local and national identities. A questionnaire was used to elicit the youth's mother tongue as well as their attitudes and perceptions towards Javanese and Bahasa Indonesia and local and national identities. Their real use of languages was obtained through non-participative observations. A sample group of 1,039 students from 10 junior and senior high schools was surveyed. The findings reveal the current status of Javanese and Bahasa Indonesia as mother tongues and the identitylanguage choice links. Most young people with Javanese parents claimed that Bahasa Indonesia is their first language. This signals a weakened intergenerational transmission of Javanese. With regard to identity, the youth's sense of national identity is stronger than their sense of local identity. To elevate the vitality of Javanese and strengthen the local identity, intergenerational transmission and intensive use of Javanese at school is imperative.

Language Identities of Multilingual College English Learners in Indonesia

“…The respondents' perception that the use of BI is more appropriate than Javanese Ngoko and can mark higher social status becomes the reason why more Javanese young parents, especially those coming from middle-and upper-class families, teach BI to their children as their first language. This conforms to the findings of Smith-Hefner (2009) and Subroto, Dwirahardjo & Setiawan (2008) that the number of youth using Javanese daily has continuously dropped and over recent decades, the number of BI speakers is on the rise and it is plausible to claim that Javanese, the language with the biggest number of speakers in Indonesia, is at risk of losing the ground (Andriyanti, 2019;Vander Klok, 2019).…”

Translanguaging and Minoritized Language Maintenance: Lessons from Indonesia

“…Ravindranath and Cohn's (2014) study suggests further that minoritized languages such as Javanese, despite having a relatively higher number of speakers, are also at risk due to the weak intergenerational transmission. The problem of the language shift from Javanese to national and English languages have been reported in recent studies (see Andriyanti, 2019;Sakhiyya & Martin-Anatias, 2020;Setiawan, 2020;Zentz, 2015). Sociolinguistic, behavioural, and demographic issues are some of the typical factors behind this issue of language shift.…”

Localized English for Ngapak Javanese Speakers as Language Instruction

“…Third, the severity of Javanese English usage is most likely to reinforce the local identity of the Javanese people that the more generic Indonesian English could not achieve (Andriyanti, 2019;Friedlander, 2011;Suharsih, 2017;Sukarno, 2010). This possibility is assumed that Bahasa Indonesia is "not an identity marker in the same way that a first language might be assumed to be" (Lamb & Coleman, 2008;Suharsih, 2017).…”