Indonesian segment alternations in Cilebut Batavian Malay

Abstract

Indonesian, the national and official language of the Republic of Indonesia, is derived from Standard Malay. Batavian is a dialect of Malay spoken by the indigenous people of Jakarta (the capital city of Indonesia) and its surroundings; and Cilebut Batavian is one of its sub-dialects. Indonesian and Cilebut Batavian share abundant cognates; and this article analyzes the alternations of the Indonesian segments in Cilebut Batavian, i.e., the alternations which are found in the cognates. The contrastive analysis is based on the fact that Indonesian is closer to Standard Malay. The data corpus is the phonological forms of the cognates, i.e. certain words shared by Indonesian and Cilebut Batavian referring to the same referents and assumed to show alternations. The phonological forms of the Indonesian cognates are based on the grapheme-phoneme-correspondence rules in Indonesian; the phonological forms of the Cilebut Batavian cognates are based on the utterances of a single native-speaker. The alternations comprise (a) strengthening, weakening, fortition, lenition, glottalization, de-glottalization, nasalization, and de-nasalization of consonants, (b) laxing, centering, and diphthongization of vowels, (c) monophthongization of diphthongs/triphthongs (d) deletion, insertion, fusion, fission, haplology, and metathesis of segments/clusters, (e) assimilations and dissimilations, (f) reduplications and de-reduplications, and (g) word-shortening. The findings show certain phonotactics in Cilebut Batavian and the contrast between the distribution of the segments in both language codes.