THE LANGUAGE USED BY INDONESIAN LOCAL GUIDES IN GOOGLE MAPS REVIEWS

Abstract

Google Maps is web-mapping service developed by Google. It provides a satellite imagery, street maps, street 360°-views, Google traffic (real-time conditions), and route-planning. One of many Google Maps features is it allows the users to give a rating, add some photos and leave a review of some places where they might ever visited or have few information about the places. By sharing some information about some particular places on review such as hotel, tourist sites, stores, restaurant, etc. it can help people who intend to visit the places to get information about it. By this article, the writer aims to find out the language used by the Google Maps users particularly, Indonesian local guides in giving the review of some particular places. Do they use their native language, Indonesian or even foreign language? Therefore, the scopes of this writing cover: 1) classification of the local guides based on the language used to give review in Google Maps 2) analyzing the language used by local guides. The data of the article is limited only a hundred Indonesian Local Guides, chosen randomly and by the numbers, it obtained 6319 reviews. The writer would use the data from some reviews on Google Maps. The steps would take to reveal all issues in this paper as follows: 1) collecting and reducing the data by listing a hundred Indonesian Local Guides, 2) identifying the reviews given based on the language that is used, whether it is frequently in Indonesian, English or even native language; 3) analyzing the language used based on its content, and 4) concluding all the findings. It can be concluded that mostly, ILGs use English to review various places on Maps. They have tendency to write in English for possibly particular reasons. Some public places are often being reviewed using English, even it is certain that majority of people who are looking for some information from Maps are local people (Indonesian). Some reviews written by ILGs do not completely provide information about the details of the place.