Wacana, Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia
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Youth culture and urban pride The sociolinguistics of East Javanese slang
Full text linkThis study offers an overview of the characteristics and social functions ofyouth slang in the Indonesian province of East Java. It examines Boso Walikan and various types of Surabayan slang. Boso Walikan emerged in Malang as a secret language that was deliberately made unintelligible to outsiders. Over the decades, large parts of Malang’s urban population developed proficiency in the language and appropriated it as an identity marker. The situation in nearby Surabaya is different. While lacking a uniform local slang comparable to that of Malang, several communities make an effort to differentiate themselves through specific linguistic habits, which are briefly introduced. These case studies tell us not only how young people shape their speech, they illustrate how the East Javanese dialect deals with linguistic variety, lexical borrowing and innovation.KeywordsSlang, youth language, Boso Walikan, East Java, Malang, Surabaya
Melacak sejarah kuno Indonesia lewat prasasti/Tracing ancient Indonesian history through inscriptions; Kumpulan tulisan/Writings of Boechari
Full text linkFamily stories; Oral tradition, memories of the past, and contemporary conflicts over land in Mentawai, Indonesia
Full text linkThis is a study of oral tradition on Mentawai family stories. The family stories relate to historical events and contemporary social issues occurred in the Mentawai Islands and affecting the Mentawai kin groups. The Mentawai family stories comprise significant elements defining different kin groups living on the Mentawai Islands. They are also an important source of information with regard to claims to ancestral land. The Mentawai family stories can furthermore be regarded as the kin groups’ verbal form of identities. Therefore, to maintain the family stories is indispensable to Mentawai communities and the power of human memory plays an important part in maintaining and transmitting the significance of these verbal identities of the communities.KeywordsMentawai, Indonesia, anthropology, oral tradition, family stories, memories of the past, and conflicts over land
Adolescent social media interaction and authorial stance in Indonesian teen fiction
Full text linkThis article examines representations of adolescent social media interaction in two Indonesian teen novels to show how adolescent communication styles are typified. It is argued that public discourse on the potential danger of social media interaction is resounded in the novels. The article demonstrates that the authors of both novels take a similar moral stance on the issue of social media but use different rhetorical strategies for indexing that stance. Both draw on the social values of registers to communicate the stance. In Online addicted, standard Indonesian is used in narration to convey an authoritative voice and a stern moral tone, while the gaul register indexes an alignment with favourable aspects of the protagonist’s character. In Jurnal Jo online, gaul is similarly given a positive value by virtue of its juxtaposition with the Alay register. In this novel, gaul is the preferred, standard register. In both novels, there is a strong orientation toward “standardness”.KeywordsAdolescent fiction, social media, register, style
Youth culture and Islam in Indonesia
Full text linkIndonesian youth culture is sometimes depicted through a moral panic discourse about mixed sex socializing. In this article, the authors challenge that view by presenting some ethnographic material on young Muslim Indonesians of both sexes socialising in an internet café and gathering during Ramadhan in a mall in Solo, Central Java. Young Indonesians enact everyday youth culture through the negotiation of space, time, and technology within the strong discourse of moral propriety and gender separation advised by contemporary Islam. The intense social bonding between same sex age peers provides security and reassurance for young men and women in the transition to adulthood. Technology is now integral to this bonding.Key WordsYouth culture, internet café, mall, technology
Early marriage, adolescent motherhood, and reproductive rights for young Sasak mothers in Lombok
Full text linkThis article focuses on Indonesian adolescents who are wives and mothers, demonstrating how early marriage and adolescent motherhood are normative among women from poor Sasak communities in Western Lombok. It is based on ethnographic research with 28 young mothers that included focus group discussions, in depth interviews, and observations. Demographic and ethnographic data on the aetiology of early marriage and adolescent motherhood are discussed, and confirm that low educational attainment for girls, lack of employment prospects, poverty, and low levels of economic development are all associated with a higher probability of adolescent marriage and motherhood in Indonesia. The article also reveals how conservative sexual morality and local marriage customs can propel girls into early marriage. It provides a human rights analysis that demonstrates how early marriage and adolescent motherhood intersect with the neglect of girls’ rights to education, employment, equality in marriage, health information, family planning, and maternal health.KeywordsIndonesia, early marriage, adolescent mothers, reproductive rights, maternal and child health
Language development of bilingual children; A case study in the acquisition of tense and aspect in an Italian-Indonesian child
Full text linkThis paper describes the development of temporal expressions in a bilingual child acquiring two typologically distinct languages: Italian and Indonesian. These languages differ from one another in the way tense and aspect are encoded and it is interesting to observe what kind of cross-linguistic influence one language system has on the other. Italian verbs are heavily inflected for person, number as well as for tense, aspect and mood, whereas, in Indonesian, the encoding of tense and aspect is lexical rather than morphological; moreover encoding is optional when the context is sufficiently clear. This means that tense and aspect in Indonesian is often marked pragmatically rather than grammatically. This paper considers the interference effects that result from simultaneously acquiring these two typologically distinct systems.Key wordsChild bilingualism, Italian, Indonesian, tense, aspect, cross-linguistic structures, interference