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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. 185–214

Jakarta Indonesian first-person singular pronouns

Form, function and variation

| University of Rochester
| Cornell University
| The University of Sydney
| Cornell University

Jakarta Indonesian is a colloquial variety of Indonesian spoken primarily in Indonesia’s capital, where it was originally a contact variety between Betawi, the local variety of Malay, and Standard Indonesian. Like other varieties of Indonesian, Jakarta Indonesian is a language with a relatively open system of pronominal reference and multiple forms for self-reference. In this paper we focus on variation in the use of first-person pronouns in Jakarta Indonesian, using two corpora of spoken data collected three decades apart. We employ both quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the form, function and social meaning of 1sg pronouns in Jakarta Indonesian, investigating both inter- and intra-speaker variation over time.

Keywords: Jakarta Indonesian, variation, quantitative methods, qualitative methods, first person pronouns, self-reference
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
  • 3.Self-reference in Jakarta Indonesian
  • 4.Methods
    • 4.1Corpora
    • 4.2Interspeaker analysis in BJI
    • 4.3Intraspeaker analysis in both corpora
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Interspeaker variation in BJI corpus
    • 5.2Intraspeaker variation in the BJI corpus
    • 5.3Intraspeaker variation in the Wallace corpus
    • 5.4Interactional uses of 1sg pronouns in the corpora
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 October 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/aplv.20012.rav
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