English Acronyms in Indonesian School Events

Abstract

This article investigates the formation of English acronyms used to name school events in an Indonesian setting. The data collected from Instagram and offline sources were taken from April to August 2018 and were classified and analyzed following Mattiello’s [2013] and Soeparno’s [1985] frameworks. There were 29 non-elliptic acronyms and 21 elliptic acronyms, of which six content words are not represented in the acronym; yet, two function words are. This research found one acronym with a consonant addition, and 24 extended acronyms. The initials retained could be followed by a non-immediate letter. Five inverted acronyms were also found, one of which involved two letters from two source words. There were seven multiple acronyms in this current research, four of which include acronyms and three of initialisms in their sources. The study also found 19 acrostic acronyms, six of which were semantically relevant. The research concludes that the English acronyms examined were also influenced by Indonesian acronym rules, especially at the length of the retained parts and the position of the retained parts in the source words. There is frequent use of non-initials and more letters retained from the source words in composing the acronyms.

Keywords

• English acronym
• Indonesian context
• names of events
• word-formation