PERSONAL NAMES AND LANGUAGE SHIFT IN EAST JAVA

Abstract

This paper is intended to trace the speed of language shift through names practices in given society. In Sidoarjo, for instance, the parents are motivated to attach foreign names to their children. Arabic loanwords are dominantly used because the religion of the name bearers is dominantly Islam. The second and the third ones are Javanese and Indonesian.The rest ones subsequently are greek, English and other foreign languages.the motivations to christen their children mostly in term of nameshakes (Widyastuti,2005). They may not realise that it will abandon their ethnic language, as a result the use of Javanese has become extinct. However, demographic factors are also relevant in accounting for the speed of language shift. Resistance to language shift tends to last longer in rural than in urban areas.Thus I will discuss two distinct communities in maintaining their language.They are rural community and urban community in East Java practicing personal names. This study presents a comparative analysis of naming practices between these communities. This analysis tries to prove that rural people may have maintained Javanese better than those in the big city.