Sumarni, Laurentia (2011). A semantic and cultural analysis of the colloquial Jakartan Indonesian discourse particles. LLT Journal, 14(1). PDF (open access)
Indonesia is a diglossic speech community, where two significantly different “high” and “low” varieties co-exist. The high variety (Bahasa Indonesia/BI) is the official language of government, education, and formal occasions, while the low variety consists of the non-standard languages commonly spoken in informal ordinary speech. Colloquial Jakartan Indonesian is the most prominent non-standard language, predominant in casual speech and associated with urban youth in the capital city, Jakarta, used by most Generations X and Y in informal communication, novels, TV shows, films, and web-based social networks.
This article discusses the semantic and cultural analysis of two colloquial Jakartan discourse particles (DPs), dong and sih. DPs mark the difference between H and L varieties and are salient features in colloquial speech. However, the usage and meaning of these particles are not considered important in the development of language in Indonesia. Their meanings are hard to pin down because a lot depends on the mood, intonation and tone of voice at the time of utterance. The pragmatic and paralinguistic aspects of the particles are not easily translatable into other languages. NSM is used as a tool for explication to arrive at the semantic core meaning of DPs dong and sih so that they are accessible across languages. Corpus data is taken from 5 novels published between 2004 and 2010.
Sound application of NSM principles carried out without prior training by an experienced NSM practitioner
