ISMIL is an annual event whose goal is the advancement of scholarship in Malay/Indonesian Linguistics, through the bringing together of linguists from Malay and Indonesian-speaking countries and their colleagues in other parts of the world.
Papers presented at ISMIL are concerned with the Malay/Indonesian language in any of its varieties. You can see the programme of this year’s symposium here. Presentations at ISMIL are delivered in English. This year, the organising committee include Peter Slomanson, Mikko Pajunen and Angela Bartens. The organisers are assisted by Henna Kortelainen, Milja Haavisto and Anastasiia Sergeeva.
The first plenary talk of the symposium is open to everyone in the Languages Unit without prior registration. The talk titled ‘Variation in Jakarta Indonesian: Linguistic, social, and stylistic factors‘ will be given by Abigail C. Cohn (Cornell University, USA).
You are cordially invited to attend the talk which will be held at 11:00-12:00 on Monday 8th June at Pinni B 1097. Please see the abstract of the plenary talk below for more information.
Variation in Jakarta Indonesia: Linguistic, social, and stylistic factors
Jakarta Indonesian JI, as an emerging variety of spoken Indonesian with a rapidly increasing
number of native speakers, provides an excellent case study to think more deeply about the
questions: What is a language? What is a language variety (dialect or register)? To what degree
do linguistic variables cohere? In what ways do individual speakers deploy these variables in
terms of stylistic and discourse functions? The Betawi-Jakarta Indonesian corpus (Gil & Tadmor,
2014), a corpus of informal conversational speech, acoustic files, carefully segmented and
transcribed, with detailed meta data, provides naturalistic data that can be used to address this
series of questions, focusing on JI.
In the present talk (based on joint work with Ferdinan Kurniawan and Maya Abtahian), we build
on earlier work done by Kurniawan (2022, 2023, and Kurniawan & Abtahian 2025), and Cohn
and colleagues (Abtahian, Vogel, Djenar) comparing six variables studied based on the BJI
corpus as reported and compared in Cohn, Vogel, and Abtahian (2022). We delve further into
their findings that the linguistic variables analyzed are not all conditioned by the same factors.
Here we continue to explore the question of the ways these variables do or don’t pattern together,
while explicitly thinking about the role of individual speakers. Following Yu and Zellou (2019),
we take an “individual difference perspective; we analyze variables that have been studied across
the corpus, looking at the use of these variables by individual speakers over the course of a
conversation. This allows us to get at the ways multiple variables are used as part of a social
toolbox in conversational communication, while at the same time considering the degree of
coherence exhibited between these variables.