First-Person Pronominal Variation, Stance and Identity in Indonesia

Abstract

Unlike Indo-European languages, many Asian languages provide their speakers with a strategic choice of first-person pronouns. This article explores how Indonesian speakers vary their selection of first-person pronouns to enact stances. It examines the selection of pronouns on the island of Java, where there is the simultaneous and somewhat contentious growth of a more dogmatic Islamic identity and a youth identity linked to Westernization. Variation is examined in casual conversations between young, intimate interlocutors and observations are supported by interviews with conversation participants. Results show speakers select pronominal forms prescribed by Indonesian grammars as well as forms drawn from Arabic and colloquial Indonesian associated with speakers from the capital Jakarta. Pronouns are shown to be selected to enact stances related to, among other things, solidarity, epistemic authority, playfulness and the mitigation of fact-threatening acts. A concluding discussion outlines how young Indonesian speakers use these stances to construct heterogeneous selves, concerned with youth, nation and religion.

Keywords:

• Stance
• Pronouns
• Stylistic Variation
• Identity
• Indonesian
• Youth Identity
• Self-Categorization Theory

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Louisa Willoughby, the GRiP (Monash Graduate Researchers in Print) group and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this paper. This paper also benefited from earlier feedback on Manns (2011) by Julie Bradshaw, Simon Musgrave and Robert Englebretson. Any mistakes contained herein remain my own.

Notes

¹Suharto and his New Order government ruled from 1966 to 1998. The New Order sought to centralize and control Indonesia's population under the guise of nationalism. The New Order propagated a highly codified variety of Indonesian through schools and the mass media. These institutions called on Indonesians to speak the Bahasa Indonesia yang baik dan benar ‘Indonesian that is good and correct’ instead of colloquial varieties of Indonesian. With the fall of Suharto, there has been a growth in local identity politics (Cole 2010) and a desire among young people for more individuated experiences (Smith-Hefner 2007a). Among other things, this has led to increased use of colloquial Indonesian varieties in the mass media and among young people.

²Participants were recorded in two separate interactions in most cases and in all cases conversations took place with close friends. When possible, participants were recorded in the first interaction with Javanese interlocutors and in the second conversation with non-Javanese interlocutors. In total, there were 18 declared Javanese native speakers and seven Indonesian native speakers. Conversations were mostly conducted in local homes and boarding houses, with some of the conversations occurring at the university or in local cafes.

³The form aku also appears in varieties of Malay and Indonesian spoken in many areas of the archipelago, including Malang. The co-occurrence of aku in these varieties, as well as its unmarked nature in this corpus, make it difficult to do anything more than speculate on aku's multifarious identity functions as I do here and in a discussion of one participant, Samson, later on in this paper.

⁴One reviewer raises the concern that Siegel's view of High Javanese as a second language unnecessarily ‘exoticizes’ and ‘orientalizes’ this style in a way that doesn't reflect the way the Javanese themselves view it. This is a valid point which should be acknowledged here. Suffice it to say, when a speaker selects High Javanese there is a metaphorical distancing between speaker and utterance. This contrasts with the more intimate nature of Low Javanese.

⁵I owe this point to one of the reviewers.

⁸Kin terms and other forms are often used as address terms in both formal and informal conversations. Kin terms or other address terms have not been glossed in this paper nor are their intricacies explained except where relevant. In a very general sense, these forms are used in a manner similar to dude in American English or mate in Australian English.

⁶The form saya is linked by many to school and public domains where more formal interactions are likely to take place.

⁷I generally sought to avoid analysing texts which were not casual or natural. However, toward the beginning of this study, research assistants were involved in a few conversations which resembled sociolinguistic interviews. In consultation with the assistants, I decided to analyse these texts. The interview-like nature of these conversations revealed marked switches to more formal Indonesian styles as will be illustrated with example (2). In sum, analysing these conversations provided some formal generic texts which could be analysed alongside this study's mostly casual interactions.

⁹The form antum, a plural second-person pronoun in Arabic, is used to address single or multiple addressees within the Malang context. The Arabic singular forms are not used by this study's participants.

¹⁰Irvine and Gal's (2000) discussion of iconicity is relevant here as has been noted by one reviewer. For instance, Samson's selection of gué could be viewed in terms of iconization. This occurs when a linguistic feature becomes attributed to a social group and comes to index that group as if that linguistic feature depicts or displays that group's essence or nature.