Tracing the Linguistic Crossroads Between Malay and Tamil

Speakers of Malay and Tamil have been in intermittent contact for roughly two millennia, yet extant academic work on the resultant processes of contact, lexical borrowing, and language mixing at the interface of these two speech communities has only exposed the tip of the proverbial iceberg. This paper presents an historical overview of language contact between Malay and Tamil through time and across the Bay of Bengal. It concludes with a call for future studies on the lexicology, dialectology, and use of colloquial language of both Malay and Tamil varieties

BILINGUALISM AND THE MAINTENANCE OF THE MOTHER TONGUE IN MULTILINGUAL SINGAPORE

Two issues have been identified that act against the development of a strong bilingual and biliteracy proficiency among pupils in Singapore schools: 1. English is perceived as having a much higher status than the Mother Tongue (MT) and the language in which success is primarily measured given its primacy as the language of instruction in all subjects except the MT. Consequently, children’s use of their MT has been observed to decline in favour of English; 2. English and the MT are taught in effect as a form of double monolingualism, in watertight compartments, with no opportunity for bilingual learning or reflection in class on the relationship between the two languages. This artificially blocks pupils’ access to the other language and prevents the development of a more robust bilingual. In this presentation, I will describe the ways in which the MT is maintained in Singapore, and in particular focus on the research that has recently been completed on the use of dual language books to rejuvenate the interest and ability to read in Malay in bilingual Malay children

Prominence in Indonesian Stress, Phrases, and Boundaries

Many (Western) languages have word-based stress, which entails that one, predictable syllable per word is more prominent than all the other syllables in that word. Some linguists claim that such stresses also occur in Indonesian. In this article, we set out to investigate that claim using experimental, phonetic methods. The results confirm our hypothesis that Indonesian lacks word-based stress. Yet, we do observe some kind of prominence pattern. In the last part of this article, we search for the phonological phenomenon that generates this pattern, exploring the level of the phrase to see whether phrasal accents or boundary markers are likely candidates

Maintaining Riau Malay Language Features through Phonological Innovations in Kampar District

The maintenance that occurs in language arises because there are causes that are very closely related to changes in language observed in certain elements found in dialect varieties, regional boundaries, number of speakers, place of residence, identity and cultural pride, and good economic conditions. This study aimed to determine (1) lexical forms of phonology and (2) the geographic distribution of phonological forms that experience variations in Riau Malay in Kampar Regency. This study uses a descriptive method with listening techniques, interviews, and recordings. The results of this study are based on its embodiment; the determination of phonetic innovation is based on the discovery of a variant that indicates a phonotactic change from the original variant at the Riau Malay observation point in Kampar Regency. The study results noted that there were 24 glosses with 67 variants indicating this type of innovation

CROSS-LINGUISTIC INFLUENCES OF MALAY THROUGH CARTOONS ON INDONESIAN CHILDREN’S LANGUAGE USE IN THE HOME DOMAIN

The Malay cartoons that air on Indonesian television channels are now popular among children in Indonesia. The shows Upin Ipin, Boboboi, and Pada Zaman Dahulu are especially popular with Acehnese children. Initial observations found that these cartoons have played a great role in the increased use of contemporary Malay in their Indonesian. Thus, this study discusses the cross-linguistic influences of Malay from cartoons in Indonesian children’s language use in the home domain. Data were collected through recordings and field notes. Some steps based on the framework by Lacey and Luff (2007) were taken to analyze the data. The results were transcribed and sifted to distinguish the significant data. The recording and its transcription were then re-checked. The last step was categorizing the data into cross-linguistic influences based on Ringbom (1987). These influences include borrowing, hybrids, phonetic influence, and relexification. The results showed the presence of only two aspects of cross-linguistic influences: borrowing and phonetic influences. Borrowing was the most frequent aspect, followed by phonetic influence. Relexification and hybrid did not appear in the data. Nevertheless, there were other cross-linguistic aspects that were found in the data, including intonation, parenthetic remark, and interjection. In the broad-spectrum, the initial mimic on the Malay cartoon characters has expanded to employment in the language use of the children while speaking Indonesian. This study is expected to contribute in some ways or another towards the development of sociolinguistics, especially in cross-linguistic influence in children’s language use. Indonesia and Malaysia are neighboring countries, and language contact between the two countries is inevitable and evident. Hence, the study on the influences can benefit sociolinguistics, especially when investigating language change in the future

Quantitative Distribution of English and Indonesian Motion Verbs and Its Typological Implications: A case study with the English and Indonesian versions of the Twilight novel

This paper investigates the quantitative distribution (type and token frequencies, and type-per-token ratio [TTR]) of motion verbs found in English and Indonesian versions of the novel Twilight (Meyer, 2005; Sari, 2008). The study is contextualized within two divergent views on the typological characteristics of Indonesian lexicalization patterns of motion events. One study (Son, 2009) suggests that Indonesian behaves like English, representing a satellite-framed pattern (i.e., lexicalizing Manner of motion in the main verb) while another study (Wienold, 1995) argues for the verb-framed nature of Indonesian (i.e., lexicalizing Path of motion in the main verb). We seek to offer a quantitative perspective to these two proposals. Our study shows that, compared to English, Indonesian has significantly higher number (i.e., types) and occurrences (i.e., tokens) of Path verbs (reflecting the verb-framed pattern). Moreover, the higher TTR value of Path verbs for Indonesian shows a greater lexical diversity in the inventory of Indonesian Path verbs compared to English. In contrast, the English Manner verbs are significantly higher in number and in token frequency than Indonesian (suggesting the satellite-framed pattern), and show greater lexical diversity given the higher TTR value. While these findings lean toward supporting the verb-framed pattern of Indonesian (Wienold, 1995), we caution with the limitation of our conclusion and offer suggestions for future study

Measuring Verbal Fluency Task Performance of Indonesian Bilinguals

Verbal fluency (VF) task is a tool that has been utilized in bilingual studies to measure executive performance of bilingual individuals. While many of the previous studies compared bilingual speakers’ performance in VF to their monolingual counterparts, this descriptive study compares exclusively the cross-linguistic VF performance of Indonesian bilinguals in their first (L1), second (L2), and third language (L3). The aim of this study was to see whether or not there were any differences in the result of their performance in each of their languages. The participants of the current study were 25 non-native bilingual university students in Indonesia who speak English in at least intermediate level. Javanese is the L1 of the participants. Indonesian is their L2, whereas English is their L3. In the VF task, the participants were requested to generate, in a rapid fashion, semantic category and phonemic category in their L1, L2, and L3. The results showed that the participants’ VF performance in English and standard Indonesian were significantly higher (p < .05) than Javanese. However, no significant difference was indicated when comparing the semantic category and phonemic category in all three languages. The findings of this study will be used as a basis for a forthcoming study on VF performance of Indonesian bilinguals

Error Analysis and Its Implications for the English Classroom: A Case Study of an Advanced English Learner

This study aims to examine English spoken language uttered by Indonesian EFL learners by employing error and interlanguage analysis. It principally focuses on highlighting the value of error and interlanguage analysis on the development of Indonesian English language teaching classroom. The data were in the form of language transcription taken from a structured sociolinguistics interview with an advanced English learner. The results indicate that errors, either on phonological, grammatical, lexical, or pragmatic competence, are principally caused by L1 or interlingual transfer, despite few occurrences of developmental errors. Regarding the implication of this study for language classroom, it offers several suggestions for improving English language classroom including an introduction of varieties of chunk languages and adjacency pairs used across cultures to students