Cover not available
Article published In:
Variation and change in the languages of Indonesia
Edited by Maya Ravindranath Abtahian and Abigail C. Cohn
[Asia-Pacific Language Variation 7:2] 2021
► pp. 142–167

Gender, mobility and contact

Stability and change in an Acehnese dialect

| Australian National University
| Australian National University
We examine variation in a rural variety of Acehnese spoken in Aceh Province, to better understand the impact of long-term contact with Indonesian and increasing urbanization. The Great Aceh variety is characterized by variable realization of word-final (t) as a dental vs. glottal stop. Analyses of over 2,000 tokens of this variable from a corpus of spontaneous speech from 35 speakers indicate that the variability is relatively stable among men, and among women of high mobility, measured in terms of education, occupation, and time spent outside Great Aceh. Women with low mobility produce the lowest rates of [t̪], and in this group we observe a higher rate of [t̪] by younger than older women, suggesting change over time. We thus find both stability – among those who have long enjoyed high levels of mobility – and change – among those most affected by recent social changes, namely low-mobility women.
Keywords: variation and change, language contact, mobility, sociophonetics, glottalization, Acehnese, Indonesian
Article outline
  • 1.Language contact in Great Aceh
  • 2.Data for the study of variation and change in Great Aceh
    • 2.1Great Aceh speech corpus
    • 2.2Participants
  • 3.Word-final (t) glottalization as a linguistic variable in Great Aceh
    • 3.1Word-final (t) glottalization and language contact
    • 3.2Extraction and coding of word-final (t)
  • 4.Word final (t) in spontaneous speech vs. reading tasks
  • 5.Word-final (t) in spontaneous speech
    • 5.1Phonological conditioning
    • 5.2Social conditioning: Gender and mobility over time
    • 5.3Modeling the constraints on variable word-final (t)
  • 6.Gender, mobility and contact in Great Aceh
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 October 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/aplv.20007.tra
References (26)
References
Abtahian, Maya R., Cohn, Abigail C., & Pepinsky, Thomas (2016). Modeling social factors in language shift. International Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2421, 139–170. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Akbar, Osra M., Abdullah, Wamad, Latif, Surya N., & Ahmaddin, Syech (1985). Pemetaan bahasa Aceh, Gayo dan Alas [Mapping the languages of Aceh, Gayo and Alas]. Jakarta: Pusat Pembinaan dan Pengembangan Bahasa.Google Scholar
Asyik, Abdul G. (1987). A contextual grammar of Acehnese sentences (complementation). Doctoral thesis, Department of Linguistics, University of Michigan.
Badan Pusat Statistik (2019). Jumlah dan distribusi penduduk [Population numbers and distribution]. Retrieved from [URL]
Bates, David, Mächler, Martin, Bolker, Ben, Walker, Steve, Christensen, R. H. B., Singmann, H., … Fox, J. (2019). lme4: Linear mixed-effects models using ‘Eigen’ and S4. (Version 1.1–121) [R package].Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan, & Easterday, Shelece (2019). Consonant strengthening: A crosslinguistic survey and articulatory proposal. Linguistic Typology, 23(2), 263–302. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Durie, Mark (1987). A grammar of Acehnese on the basis of a dialect of North Aceh. Dordrecht: Foris Publications Holland.Google Scholar
Florey, Margaret (Ed.). (2010). Endangered languages of Austronesia. New York: Oxford University.Google Scholar
Hothorn, Torsten, Hornik, Kurt, & Zeileis, Achim (2006). Unbiased recursive partitioning: A conditional inference framework. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 15 (3), 651–674. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kurniasih, Yacinta (2005). Gender, class and language preference: A case study in Yogyakarta. In Keith Allan (Ed.), Selected papers from the 2005 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society. [URL]
Labov, William (1972). Sociolinguistic patterns. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
(1984). Field methods of the project on linguistic change and variation. In John Baugh & Joel Sherzer (Eds.), Language in use: Readings in sociolinguistics (pp. 28–53). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Lausberg, Hedda, & Sloetjes, Han (2009). Coding gestural behavior with the NEUROGES-ELAN system. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers, 41(3), 841–849. (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Language Archive, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. [URL]). DOI logo
Levshina, Natalia (2015). How to do linguistics with R: Data exploration and statistical analysis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nugraheni, Yunita, & Ellyawati, Hetty C. (2013). Phonology analysis of Acehnese. Lensa: Kajian kebahasaan, kesusastraan, dan budaya [Lensa: The study of language, literature, and culture], 3(2), 86–97. [URL]
R Development Core Team (2019). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. [URL]
Sankoff, Gillian (2006). Age: Apparent time and real time. In Keith Brown (Ed.), Encyclopedia of language and linguistics (2nd ed., pp. 110–116). Oxford: Elsevier. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schleef, Erik (2013). Glottal replacement of /t/ in two British capitals: Effects of word frequency and morphological compositionality. Language Variation and Change, 25(2), 201–223. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Smith-Hefner, Nancy J. (2009). Language shift, gender, and ideologies of modernity in Central Java, Indonesia. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 19(1), 57–77. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Soderberg, Craig D., & Olson, Kenneth S. (2008). Indonesian. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 38(2), 209–213. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stanford, James N. (2008). A sociotonetic analysis of Sui dialect contact. Language Variation and Change, 20(3), 409–450. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sulaiman, Budiman (1979). Bahasa Aceh [The Acehnese language]. Jakarta: Pusat Pembinaan dan Pengembangan Bahasa, Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan.Google Scholar
Sulaiman, Budiman, Ali, Zaini, & Lani, H. Razali Cut (2008). Meurunoe Bahasa Aceh Glah 3 [Learning Acehnese grade 3]. Banda Aceh: Boebon Jaya.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali, & Baayen, Harold (2012). Models, forests, and trees of York English: Was/were variation as a case study for statistical practice. Language Variation and Change, 24(2), 135–178. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Torres Cacoullos, Rena, & Travis, Catherine E. (2018). Bilingualism in the community: Code-switching and grammars in contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zen, Evynurul L., & Starr, Rebecca L. (This volume). Variation and contact-induced change in Javanese phonology among multilingual children in Indonesia. Asia-Pacific Language Variation.
Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Pepinsky, Thomas B., Maya Ravindranath Abtahian & Abigail C. Cohn
2024. Urbanization, ethnic diversity, and language shift in Indonesia. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 45:7 ► pp. 2503 ff. DOI logo
Abtahian, Maya Ravindranath, Abigail C. Cohn & Yanti
2022. Language labeling and ideology in Indonesia. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2022:277 ► pp. 147 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 9 october 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.