LANGUAGE DOCUMENTATION ON JAVANESE: A SHIFT TOWARDS RECOGNIZING AND CELEBRATING COLLOQUIAL VARIETIES

Abstract

Javanese has benefitted from a long history of linguistic study. To focus on grammars, Javanese boasts grammars in French by Favre (1866); in Dutch by Kiliaan (1919), Prijohoetomo (1937), Arps et al. (2000); in Indonesian by Suharno (1982), Sudaryanto (1991; ed), Wedhawati et al. (2006); in English by Horne (1961), Keeler (1992), Robson (2014); among others. Although Javanese already has a stable scholarly tradition, the focus has been almost exclusively on the Standard variety, spoken in the principalities of Yogyakarta and Solo, constituting a small sliver of the attested language. Given its vast dialectal variation, there is still a huge need for linguistic research on Javanese. With the advent of establishing language documentation as a branch of linguistics (Himmelmann 1991), some progress has been made in the documentation and description of colloquial varieties: for example, Suwadji (1981) on Javanese varieties on the north coast of Central Java; Conners (2008) on Tengger Javanese; Hoogervorst (2010) on Surabayan Javanese; Vander Klok (2012) on Paciran Javanese. These works represent a shift towards the recognition and validation of non-standard varieties of Javanese, which were unnoticed in the past. We advocate for the continuation of this trend. In particular, we present our work on the documentation of two colloquial varieties of Javanese, Malang Javanese and Semarang Javanese, for which the outcome of this project is a reference grammar. We end by highlighting the importance of such documentation, especially of non-standard varieties, for language maintenance: even large languages are susceptible to language endangerment, and Javanese is no exception (e.g. Kurniasih 2006; Smith-Hefner 2009; Cohn et al. 2013).