Southeast Asia: One Community, Multilingual Nations

The CALA 2019 Proceedings, 2019

Southeast Asia (SEA) is not only rich in multicultural areas but also rich in multilingual nations with the population of more than 624 million and more than 1,253 languages (Ethnologue 2015). With the cultural uniqueness of each country, this region also accords each national languages with language planning and political management. This strategy brings a challenges to SEA and can lead to conflicts among other ethnic groups, largely owing to leadership. The ethnic conflicts of SEA bring controversy between governments and minorities, such as the ethnic conflict in Aceh, Indonesia, the Muslim population of the south Thailand, and the Bangsa Moro of Mindanao, of the Philippines. The objective of this paper is to investigate the characteristics of the linguistic perspectives of SEA. This research examines two main problems. First, this paper investigates the linguistic area which refers to a geographical area in which genetically unrelated languages have come to share many linguistic features as a result of long mutual influence. The SEA has been called a linguistic area because languages share many features in common such as lexical tone, classifiers, serial verbs, verb-final items, prepositions, and noun-adjective order. SEA consists of five language families such as Austronesian, Mon-Khmer, Sino-Tibetan, Tai-Kadai, and Hmong-Mien. Second, this paper also examines why each nation of SEA takes one language to become the national language of the nation. The National language plays an important role in the educational system because some nations take the same languages as a national language—the Malay language in the case of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. The research method of this paper is to apply comparative method to find out the linguistic features of the languages of SEA in terms of phonology, morphology, and grammar.

The Mainland Southeast Asia Linguistic Area, Mouton de Gruyter, 2019

English and Malay languages are categorized as popular languages in the world. However, both languages underwent different history and composition. This study investigates the languages in terms of history, phonology, loanwords, grammar, morphology and semantics. The purposes of studying the comparisons and contrasts of both languages are not only to analyze the uniqueness of the languages but also to identify the process of understanding the languages especially the view of second language learners. It is found that two languages come from different background; somehow they share similar characteristics such as the vowels sounds, loanwords and semantics. However, the learners face difficulty in learning both languages especially in pronunciations and spelling.

Rizal Technological University, 2017

Language plays an important role in every society. It defines every country’s cultural identity and is considered part of their heritage. It is their medium of instruction in educating people and spreading the religion (Philippine Daily Inquirer, 2007). Thus, this paper discussed Linguistic Identity in Asia by analyzing the languages used in different regions in Asia, and linguistic analysis using syntax or the grammatical arrangement of words in sentence, and morphemes or the smallest meaningful unit of language with an explanation of their cultures.

The Mainland Southeast Asia Linguistic Area, 2019

Thomason and Kaufman’s 1988 book Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics had a stimulating effect on the fields of comparative and descriptive linguistics and inspired a number of studies on various topics related to language contact: the relationship between typology and language contact; the effect of language contact on a language’s genetically inherited characteristics, and work on mixed and endangered languages. More generally speaking, the increased availability of data relating to language contact has enabled widerranging discussion on the nature of language contact and its consequences (see Hickey 2010 for a more detailed account of these subjects). Within this landscape, our book lies at the crossroads of the following themes: (1) vulnerable and endangered languages, since some of the languages described here are minority languages losing ground under the linguistic influence of dominant neighbouring languages (see chapters on Cham, Wa); (2) areal typology, ...

1998

Theory and Practice in Language Studies

The coastal community of Tuban Regency has a distinctive language identity. This language identity becomes a distinguishing element with the surrounding speech community. It appears in the marine lexicon they use. This study aims to examine the linguistic identity by describing (1) the linguistic situation of the community, (2) the marine lexicon, which is their language identity, and (3) the relationship between the lexicon and its socio-cultural conditions in terms of Redfield's theory. The researcher collected data by observation and interviews in an ethnolinguistic framework to achieve this. The results of the study show (1) the linguistic situation of the coastal community of Tuban Regency has Mataraman Javanese as their mother tongue but is interfered with Arek Javanese and Madurese languages. (2) The naming of fish, ship parts, fishing equipment and fishing activities becomes a marine lexicon as a marker of the language identity of the speech community. (3) The marine lex...

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements in Ling 135 Contrastive Analysis of English

Moderna Språk

In this book, Asya Pereltsvaig, lecturer at Stanford University, sets out to give us an overview of the languages of the world and their structural diversity. Basing her description on concrete examples, she gives a typological view of the various language families, mostly, but not always, from a geographic starting point. The text is presented in a pedagogical and student oriented way that suggests great experience, both as a writer and a teacher. After an introduction where she discusses basic concepts like languages, dialects and accents, language families and language diversity the author starts off with a rather short chapter on the Indo-European languages, followed by eight chapters on the linguistic situation in different parts of the world, which give a very good overview of the present-day situation. At the end of each of these chapters she focuses on a specific linguistic question that is relevant to that particular group of languages or to the geo-cultural situation, e.g. 'Lesser known Indo-European Languages', 'Universals and parametric theory of the languages', 'Field linguistics' and 'Language contact'. This is a very good way of keeping the reader's interest. She also successfully avoids a tedious repetitive catalogue description of the geo-linguistic situation of the world by focusing on general typology and on a few representative or enigmatic cases. This way the book should capture the students' (i.e. readers') interest in continuing their reading, thus deepening their knowledge and motivation. The reader is provided with intriguing and motivating questions throughout the book, which show the author's deep knowledge and capacity to synthesize the complex matter into comprehensible résumés. The author has also included some small grey boxes where she discusses specific topics such as 'Knights, riders and false friends', 'Pioneers of the Pacific' and 'Language diversity and density'. The book ends with two chapters on 'macro families' (the idea of nostratic languages and similar "macroviews") and 'pidgins, creoles and other mixed languages'. The book is a truly exhaustive presentation of the languages of the world, focusing on the contemporary situation and the relationships between these languages, not only in terms of forming different "families" but also from a typological standpoint, which makes the reading more interesting and also offers a better scholarly perspective. This way the author is able to introduce the reader into such fields of vital linguistic interest as language contact, field linguistics, universals and the officiality of languages without a long repetitive presentation of all the world's languages but rather focusing on what is representative and characteristic, and this in itself makes the book more valuable as a textbook and as a stimulus. It is obvious that the value and utility of the book increases considerably because of this approach. There is no mistaking the fascination and interest on the part of the author in attempting to systematize and pedagogize such an enormous scholarly field as that

Parangalcang Brother Andrew. Festschrift for Andrew Gonzales on His Sixtieth Birthday. Editors: Ma Lourdes S. Bautista, Teodoro A. Llamzon, Bonifacio P. Sibayan. Linguistic Society of the Philippines. , 2000

Language is connected with many sides of social-economic, political, cultural and everyday (private) life of society in any country. In this connection the study of language situation and language policy seems to be highly relevant not only from purely linguistic point of view, but from social-political one as well, because it helps to analyze more deeply and sometimes to look anew to one or another process in the society. Particularly fruitful is to undertake a benchmark analysis of these processes in the dynamic developing Nusantara countries (insular South-East Asia), which are distinguished by the multi-national composition and are rather dense, though not equally populated: 202.5 millions of Indonesians are placed on area of nearly 2 000 thousand km2 (nearly 80 percent of the islands are populated) (Indonesia 1997:16), 80 millions Filipinos - on the territory of 300 thousand km2 (95 percent accounts for 11 most large islands of the Philippine archipelago), 17,6 millions Malaysians occupy nearly 333 thousand km2 (Information 1997: 64). Singapore here is an exception, because its population is nearly 3 millions persons and the area of the island does not exceed 700 km2 (Census 1991: 17). However with all external similarities between these countries language situation in each of it has its own particularities, and language policy has some similar and some different features.