Patterns of Variation in Jakarta Indonesian: Linguistic and Social Dimensions

Abstract

Colloquial varieties of Indonesian are increasingly becoming the native languages of a significant portion of the Indonesian population. Notable in this regard is Jakarta Indonesian (JI). We seek to examine the nature of variation in this increasingly widely spoken variety based on the Betawi-Jakarta Indonesian corpus (Gil & Tadmor 2014). We investigate variation within a subset of speakers comparing the phonological variables Kurniawan (2018) examined (word-final [a] ~ [e], word-final [h] ~ [ʔ] ~ Ø, and active prefix N- ~ [ŋə]) with the additional variables word-initial [s] ~ Ø and [h] ~ Ø (Cohn & Vogel 2019) and first person singular (1SG) pronouns (Abtahian, Cohn, Djenar & Vogel 2021). Investigation of this new emerging variety demonstrates both inter- and intra-speaker variation for the variables analyzed, but shows that the variables are not all conditioned by the same linguistic and social factors.