The acquisition of stylistic variation by Jakarta Indonesian Children

Abstract

This study 2 deals with the acquisition of Indonesian varieties used in Jakarta-the standard variety of Indonesian, the Bahasa Indonesia (BI) and the nonstandard one, the Colloquial Jakarta Indonesian (CJI)-by children of middle class families. Many today's Jakarta Indonesian children learn Indonesian as their first language in informal settings, and generally they learn the informal variety first, namely Colloquial Jakarta Indonesian (CJI) (see also Wouk 1989, 1999). Yet, at very early age, before formal schooling, they are also confronted with the formal variety of Indonesian, the Bahasa Indonesia (BI) as they learned from children program in television or story-telling by parents. Children are also encouraged to speak BI as a means of politeness. The focus in this study is on factors that influence choice of the language variety, capability of style-shifting, and morphological variation. The main research questions concern the following.

Towards developing colloquial Indonesian language pedagogy: A corpus analysis

“…Research on Indonesian diglossia was pioneered by Errington (1986) and subsequent extensive research was continued by Sneddon (2001). Linguistic descriptions have been undertaken by Nothofer (1995), Sneddon (2001Sneddon ( , 2003Sneddon ( , 2006, Djenar (2006Djenar ( , 2008, Djenar & Ewing (2015), Tjung et al (2006), Smith-Hefner (2007) and Kushartanti (2014). Many of these studies concentrated on the social and grammatical functions of selected lexical items.…”

“…The Jakartan population, the youth especially, created many new words and phrases, even though the linguistic patterns, grammar, phonology and morphology did not evolve beyond those of Betawi Malay. It has been noted that children in Jakarta and the surroundings grow up speaking a register of Indonesian that leans strongly towards CI (Kushartanti, 2014).…”

Semantic and Pragmatic Meaning in Indonesian Child Utterances

“…The researches about child's language acquisition have been conducted in many aspects, such as speech act [10], The acquisition of Stylistic Variation [11] and a 1,4-year-old child language acquisition [12]. However, the study about semantic and pragmatic meaning in children language acquisition has been not found yet.…”

Children’s use of Bahasa Indonesia in Jakarta kindergartens

“…When the new preschoolers meet the teachers, even for the very first time, they already have to understand the importance of using the 1 This article is dedicated to Hein Steinhauer. The content of this article is partly based on the study on the acquisition of Indonesian varieties by Jakarta children (see Kushartanti 2014a).…”

“…This article highlights part of a study on the acquisition of Indonesian varieties by Jakarta Indonesian children, aged three to five (Kushartanti 2014a). The study involved Jakarta preschoolers from middle-class families who attend playgroups and kindergartens located in South Jakarta, Depok, and Tangerang.…”