•  
  •  
 

Abstract

This article examines representations of adolescent social media interaction in two Indonesian teen novels to show how adolescent communication styles are typified. It is argued that public discourse on the potential danger of social media interaction is resounded in the novels. The article demonstrates that the authors of both novels take a similar moral stance on the issue of social media but use different rhetorical strategies for indexing that stance. Both draw on the social values of registers to communicate the stance. In Online addicted, standard Indonesian is used in narration to convey an authoritative voice and a stern moral tone, while the gaul register indexes an alignment with favourable aspects of the protagonist's character. In Jurnal Jo online, gaul is similarly given a positive value by virtue of its juxtaposition with the Alay register. In this novel, gaul is the preferred, standard register. In both novels, there is a strong orientation toward "standardness".

References

Agha, Asif. 1998. “Stereotypes and registers of honorific language”, Language in Society 27: 151-193.

Agha, Asif. 2005. “Voice, footing, enregisterment”, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1): 38-59.

Bakhtin, M. 1981. “Discourse in the novel”, in: Michael Holquist (ed.), translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, The dialogic imagination; Four essays, pp. 259–422. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Bell, Alan. 2001. “Back in style”, in: P. Eckert and J.R. Rickford (eds), Style and sociolinguistic variation, pp. 139-169. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bucholtz, Mary and Kira Hall. 2005. “Identity and interaction; A sociocultural linguistic approach”, Discourse Studies 7: 585–614.

Coupland, Nikolas. 2007. Style; Language variation and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Djenar, Dwi Noverini. 2007. Semantic, pragmatic, and discourse perspectives of preposition use; A study of Indonesian locatives. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

Djenar, Dwi Noverini. 2012. “Almost unbridled; Indonesian youth language and its critics”, South East Asia Research 20(1): 35-51.

Englebretson, Robert. 2007. “Grammatical resources for social purposes: Some aspects of stancetaking in colloquial Indonesian conversation”, in: R. Englebretson (ed.), Stancetaking in discourse; Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction, pp. 69-110. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Ewing, Michael C. 2005. “Colloquial Indonesian”, in: K.A. Adelaar and N. Himmelmann (eds), The Austronesian languages of Asia and Madagascar, pp. 227-258. London: Routledge.

Fludernik, Monica. 1993. The fictions of language and the languages of fiction: The linguistic representation of speech and consciousness. London: Routledge.

Irvine, J.T. 2001. “’Style’ as distinctiveness; The culture and ideology of linguistic differentiation”, in: P. Eckert and J.R. Rickford (eds), Style and sociolinguistic variation, pp. 21-43. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jaffe, Alexandra. 2009. “Introduction; The sociolinguistics of stance”, in: Alexandra Jaffe (ed.), Stance; sociolinguistic perspectives, pp. 3-28. New York: Oxford University Press.

Manns, Howard. 2011. “Stance, style, and identity in Java“. Unpublished PhD thesis, Linguistics Program, Monash University.

Milroy, James and Lesley Milroy. 1985. Authority in language; Investigating language prescription and standardisation. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Ochs, Elinor. 1992. “Indexing gender”, in: Alessandro Duranti (ed.), Rethinking context; Language as interactive phenomenon, pp. 335-358. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Smith-Hefner, Nancy. 2007. “Youth language, the language of sociability, and the new Indonesian middle-class”, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 17(2): 184-203.

Sneddon, James N. 2006. Colloquial Jakartan Indonesian. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

Terate, Ken. 2010. Jurnal Jo online. Jakarta: Gramedia Pustaka Utama.

Tjiunata, Irena. 2011. Online addicted. Jakarta: Gramedia Pustaka Utama.

Download

Share

COinS