Variation and change in Jakarta Indonesian first-person singular pronouns
In this paper we investigate variation in overt 1sg pronouns in Colloquial Jakarta Indonesian (JI), considered a contact variety between Betawi Malay and Standard Indonesian (SI). We use a corpus of colloquial naturalistic data (MPI-Jakarta Field Station) to analyze the social and linguistic factors conditioning variation between gua/gue, associated with Jakarta identity and youth; saya, the SI variant; aku, from Javanese and associated with Javanese ethnicity; and kita ‘1pl inclusive’ occasionally used as singular. The analysis is based on 3796 tokens from 40 speakers (male and female, aged 18-83, and a mix of educational and linguistic backgrounds). We observe aku and gua/gue among both JI and Betawi speakers, with particularly low rates of aku. Overall rates of gua/gue are higher among JI speakers and younger speakers, consistent with its use as a marker of youth speech. However, comparison with data from the 1960s suggests this is an age grading effect.
