THE POTENTIAL LOSS OF SASAK SPEECH LEVEL: A SURVEY OF LANGUAGE USE AMONG SASAK YOUTHS IN WEST LOMBOK

Abstract

This paper presents the findings of research investigating the extent to which Sasak youth in Lombok understand and master Sasak speech level. What has been afraid of by many as to the incompetence of the youth to using honorific vocabularies of Sasak and thereby the potential loss of this high variety of Sasak is proven. The average Sasak youth mastery of Sasak honorific vocabularies as well as their competence in using and constructing Sasak speech level are categorized as ‘poor’. Their average scores for the vocabulary mastery are 56,58 and 51,55 for their sentence constructions and using the language variety. Several factors are addressed to have affected the unfavorable use of Sasak speech level among the youths. First, there is the environment factor, which is not conducive enough to allow people to use to hearing and practicing the honorific Sasak lexicon. The youth could hardly hear people talking respectfully and elegantly in home environment, neighborhood, at school or even wherever possible. This is due to the assumption that Speech levels belong only to the bangsawan ‘aristocrat’ family members. Second, the numbers of the noblemen family members who use this variety are also decreasing. There are, certainly, noblemen family decendants who consistently practice the use of speech level to their family members,but the numbers are quite a few. Third, the widely use of Bahasa Indonesia in almost every domain of language use cannot be avoided to influence the young generation to communicate in it wherever possible. And fourth, it appears that the time allotment to theteaching of Sasak as local content in the school curriculum does not allow to cover the teaching of the speech level.