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Variation and change in the languages of Indonesia
Edited by Maya Ravindranath Abtahian and Abigail C. Cohn
[Asia-Pacific Language Variation 7:2] 2021
► pp. 142–167

Gender, mobility and contact

Stability and change in an Acehnese dialect

| Australian National University
| Australian National University
We examine variation in a rural variety of Acehnese spoken in Aceh Province, to better understand the impact of long-term contact with Indonesian and increasing urbanization. The Great Aceh variety is characterized by variable realization of word-final (t) as a dental vs. glottal stop. Analyses of over 2,000 tokens of this variable from a corpus of spontaneous speech from 35 speakers indicate that the variability is relatively stable among men, and among women of high mobility, measured in terms of education, occupation, and time spent outside Great Aceh. Women with low mobility produce the lowest rates of [t̪], and in this group we observe a higher rate of [t̪] by younger than older women, suggesting change over time. We thus find both stability – among those who have long enjoyed high levels of mobility – and change – among those most affected by recent social changes, namely low-mobility women.
Keywords: variation and change, language contact, mobility, sociophonetics, glottalization, Acehnese, Indonesian
Article outline
  • 1.Language contact in Great Aceh
  • 2.Data for the study of variation and change in Great Aceh
    • 2.1Great Aceh speech corpus
    • 2.2Participants
  • 3.Word-final (t) glottalization as a linguistic variable in Great Aceh
    • 3.1Word-final (t) glottalization and language contact
    • 3.2Extraction and coding of word-final (t)
  • 4.Word final (t) in spontaneous speech vs. reading tasks
  • 5.Word-final (t) in spontaneous speech
    • 5.1Phonological conditioning
    • 5.2Social conditioning: Gender and mobility over time
    • 5.3Modeling the constraints on variable word-final (t)
  • 6.Gender, mobility and contact in Great Aceh
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 October 2021
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https://doi.org/10.1075/aplv.20007.tra
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Abtahian, Maya Ravindranath, Abigail C. Cohn & Yanti
2022. Language labeling and ideology in Indonesia. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2022:277 ► pp. 147 ff. DOI logo
Pepinsky, Thomas B., Maya Ravindranath Abtahian & Abigail C. Cohn
2022. Urbanization, ethnic diversity, and language shift in Indonesia. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

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