International Journal of Indonesian Studies Volume 1, Issue 3 | Page 43

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INDONESIAN STUDIES
SPRING 2016
Although most content only covered grammar and translation from English to
Indonesian or vice versa and there may not have been direct access to native speakers of
English, more Indonesians learned English for the first time. The influence of western
products and cultures such as fast food chains, Hollywood movies, western popular music
and TV shows (especially MTV) has made English familiar, particularly among young
Indonesians. While certain people feared that English would degrade the national and local
languages and cultures (Alwasilah, 1997), those residing in big cities have noticed that
English is helpful in education and business. Gunarwan (1998 in Lauder 2008) pointed out
that English owns prestige among Indonesians. Recently, many job vacancies include English
skills as one of the most vital requirements. The ability to speak English may boost an
applicant’s chance to get a decent job. English brings along a symbol of education,
modernity and sophistication (Lauder, 2008).
The norm, however, still leans to either British or American English (ibid). Although it
is predicted that Indonesia will develop its own standard of English, Lauder (2008) argued
that it will take quite a while to have something equivalent to such English varieties like
Singaporean or Indian English. Nevertheless, it is worth noticing some loanwords and
phonological adaption of English which have long been used in Indonesian English. Take the
example of ‘fren ciken’, ‘ayam kentaki’ (Kentucky chicken), or ‘ayam fren ciken’ (chicken fried
chicken) which refers to the fried chicken in the American fast food restaurant and was
commonly heard in the 1990s. It is interesting to see how Indonesians would never call their
own traditional fried chicken (with different recipes) ‘fried chicken’. It remains to be called
‘ayam goreng ’(ayam = chicken; goreng = fried).
The current use of English in Indonesia and code-switching
Recent scholars indicate that English has been used in more contexts and media. Da Silva
(2013) found a high percentage of English borrowings and code-switching in her study of
two blog short stories. Certain words such as ‘meeting’, ‘game’, ‘chatting’ and ‘update’ are
commonly found in Indonesian sentences. According to Haugen (150, pp. 210-231) and
Sneddon (2003) in da Silva (2013), borrowings can be categorised as loanwords (original
words in one language which are used in another, such as ‘stop’, ‘baseball’, ‘game’ etc),
loanblends (when a linguistic item in a language is mixed with an item in another language,
such as ‘diupload’), loanshift (extension of meanings in the other language, such as ‘kerja
sama’) and coinage (combination of units from two different languages, such as ‘ilmuwan’ –
“ilm” from Arabic and ‘wan’ functions as a suffix in Sanskrit). In her study of the two blog
short stories, da Silva (2013) also found apparent phonological adaption of some lexical
items such as ‘oke’ (English: okay), ‘eniwei’ (anyway) and ‘meibi’ (maybe). Several cases of
code-switching are also discovered in the study. Code-switching occurs when there is a shift
of words, clauses or sentences from one language to another (Baker, 2001). According to
Poplack (1980), tag-switching includes an insertion of a tag from one language into an
utterance in another language. Intra-sentential switching is classified when a word, a phrase
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