LINGUISTIC DOMAINS: KEYS TO THE MAINTENANCE OF JAVANESE

Abstract

This paper deals with the language maintenance of Javanese. What most linguists, language planners, activists or official institutions have done so far is to campaign the use of Javanese in certain ‘locales’ or places, especially schools or local government offices. They rarely refer to the original notion of domains, as suggested by Fishman, so that they focus on more ‘locales’ (places or settings) than ‘topics’ (contents of communications). According to Fishman, ‘topic’ is the most crucial regulator of language use in all domains if compared to the other two factors, namely: ‘participants’ and ‘locales’. This paper is questioning whether the language policy on the language maintenance of Javanese having been done so far will be effective to meet the target.