| This thesis deals with the use of Javanese, Bahasa Indonesia and English in the spoken and written communication of high school youths in the city of Semarang, Central Java. The thesis aims to understand the patterns in which youths make use of these languages in various communicative contexts and the way youths use languages to either enact or negotiate the polycentric "push and pull" of the various language ideologies associated with local, national, and global language. Data collection was conducted using ethnographic methods, which involved participant observation, recordings of conversations, collection of texts, as well as interviews with youth groups and teachers.;The study follows an analytical perspective that emphasizes speakers' use of multiple languages rather than their competence in these languages (e.g. Meeuwis and Blommaert 1998, Jorgensen 2008, Moller and Jorgensen 2009). The analysis focuses on understanding the social or indexical meanings that are attached to youths' use of multiple languages and it is guided by concepts rooted in the notion of "social language", particularly Bakhtin's (1981) notion of heteroglossia and Blommaert's (2007a, 2007b) notions of "orders of indexicality" and "sociolinguistic scale". The latter concepts provide additional attention to the often-hierarchical evaluation of language forms.;The dominant language ideologies on Javanese, Bahasa Indonesia, and English, are the result of historical processes ranging from colonial language policy, national language planning, local language standardization, and the recent "discourse of globalism" (Fairclough 2006). Youths' use of multiple languages can either conform to or diverge from the dominant ideologies of language and multilingualism, with their use of languages "constituting possibilities" (Goebel 2007) for them to evoke a range of indexical meanings. They can alternate between multiple languages to index clear shifts in indexical meanings or to perform more subtle discourse-oriented functions. Nonetheless, this range of multilingualism is interconnected since it is based on the youths' general repertoire, though the interconnections are often put under language ideological "erasure" (Irvine and Gal 2000). Youths' multilingualism is influenced not just by the normative demands of schooling, but also the practical demands of the job market, as well as youths' own lifestyle and popular culture. |
