MPI EVA Department of Linguistics Jakarta Field Station Front page
(The Former) Jakarta Field Station
of the
Max Planck Institute
for Evolutionary Anthropology
Jakarta Field Station Front page
 
Data
Projects
  Language Acquisition
  Bilingual Language Acquisition
  Language Contact
  Language Description
  Language Experiments
  Javanese Dialectology
  Metaphor and Emotion
Collaborative Projects
  Documentation of Kenyah
  Figurative Language
  Language and Thought
  Phon. of Jakarta Indonesian
  Traditional Jambi Malay
  Moluccan [external link]
  Acquisition of Passive Voice
  Sociolinguistic Questionnaire
Former Collaborative Projects
  Acq. of Morpho-phonology
Publications & Conf. Papers
News
Regular Events
Events
The Jakarta Forum
Contact Us
People
Site Map
Links

Impressum
Jakarta Field Station > Projects > Language Contact > Semarangan

Semarangan


'Semarangan' is how the Chinese community of Semarang, a city on Java's north coast, refer to the way they speak. Their speech appears to be a mixture of Javanese and Indonesian, with the bulk of the syntax and phonology coming from Javanese, but the morpheme inventory (both content and function words, including affixes) fluctuating freely between Javanese and Indonesian. It is not clear yet whether Semarangan is simply a manifestation of code switching and mixing, an individual performance phenomenon, or whether it is crystallizing into a language. Initial findings suggest that we are dealing mostly with random code switching/mixing by bilingual speakers. However, Semarangan has a few unique features, not recorded in Indonesian or in the local Javanese dialect (as used by ethnic Javanese), for example the locative preposition da. This may be an indication that Semarangan is in the process of developing into a code in its own right.


Last modified: 3 June 2003
Location: semarangan.php.html