36 Wacana Vol. 19 No. 1 (2018)
© 2018 Faculty of Humanities, Universitas Indonesia
Wacana Vol. 19 No. 1 (2018): 36-57
Aris Munandar is a lecturer at Intercultural Studies Department, Faculty of Cultural Sciences,
Universitas Gadjah Mada. His main research interests are sociolinguistics and language
maintenance and shift. His publications include: “Indexicality of religious identity in YALE MSA
e-communication”, Humaniora 27/3: 330-339 (2015), “Simple, yet powerful English in Move On’s
campaigns”, Humaniora 24/1: 95-103 (2012). He can be contacted at: arismunandar@ugm.ac.id.
Aris Munandar | DOI: 10.17510/wacana.v19i1.617.
Losing the battle
The marginalization of Javanese compact forms
Aris Munandar
AbstrAct
In the contact situation with Indonesian, the standard variety of Javanese in
Yogyakarta is experiencing an incipient shift. The shift is indicated by the
shrinking domain of use, and the degradation of speakers’ proiciency. It also
reveals some ongoing changes in its structure, observable in the tendency of
the younger generation to use particular elements different to those used by
grandparent and parent generations. This article examines unique patterns
of Javanese morphosyntax by focusing on the sufix -a, inix -um-, -in-, and
conix ka-an, on the basis of utterances recorded from authentic speech events
involving speakers of different generations. The indings show a gradual
replacement of these afixes by a more general morphosyntax pattern similar to
that of Indonesian. It concludes that the sufix -a and inix -um-, -in- exhibit low
resistance to the imposition of Indonesian. It also predicts that in future Javanese
will show more convergent with Indonesian because of the marginalization of
unique patterns of Javanese morphosyntax.
Keywords
Javanese; compact form; afixation; structural change; shift and maintenance.
IntroductIon
Javanese and Indonesian are agglutinative languages, both using afixes to
form morphologically complex words (Sukarto 2012). Findings from previous
research using contrastive analysis techniques have shown that both languages
have similar afixes, for instance, the sufix -i, preix sa- (Javanese) /preix
se- (Indonesian), preix pi-, etcetera. These similarities inluence speakers
when they are using either their regional laguage or Indonesian (Sukarto
2012). In intensive contact with Indonesian, how does Javanese behave,