Speech Communities and Lexical Strata of Indonesian Vocabulary

Mie Hiramoto Sanders

University of Hawai‘i at Manoa

In this paper, I compare the speech of two different communities, native speakers of Indonesian in (1) Indonesia and (2) the US.  I hypothesize that speakers in (2), who are exposed to more English, treat English loanwords more like native or nativized vocabulary than speakers in (1).  In Bahasa Indonesia, consonant assimilation and deletion in the prefix  m«N- is invariant (potoN: m«N-potoN à m«motoN ‘to cut’) with native vocabulary or nativized loanwords, but in newly adopted loanwords these rules do not always apply (English proses: m«N-proses à m«mroses or m«mproses ‘to process’).  Similarly, although m«N- is invariably realized as m«N- with vowel-initial stems, in native vocabulary or nativized loanwords the resulting affixed word is syllabified with the velar nasal as syllable onset (m«N-ancam à m«.Nan.cam ‘to threaten’), while in nonnativized loans the velar nasal is syllabified as syllable coda (m«N-asosiasi à m«N.a.so.si.a.si.kan ‘to associate with’).  Together these two lines of evidence can be used to distinguish layers or strata in the Indonesian lexicon.  The first stratum contains native material and nativized loans, while the second contains loanwords which have yet to be fully integrated into the phonological and morphological processes of the language.  The speakers in the different speech communities such as (1) and (2) are expected to show variation in the articulation of transitive verb formations with English loanwords if the different speech communities are triggering factors of the rule applications.