Language and identity: a sociolinguistic survey of the Indonesian speech community in Wellington New Zealand

Abstract

The multilingual situation existing in the Indonesian speech community in Wellington New Zealand was investigated, and the findings were compared with those from a similar study conducted by Nancy Tanner in America in 1962. The language resources of the community comprised the Indonesian language; some of the regional languages of Indonesia; Classical Arabic; the English language; the Dutch language; and other foreign languages. The American and New Zealand samples closely resembled one another in their ability levels for Indonesian and the regional languages, but differed with respect to English and Dutch. The greater number of people who knew and used English in the New Zealand sample was most readily attributable to the its inclusion of permanent New Zealand residents and citizens. For Dutch, however, there was good evidence of language shift. Whereas 75% of the American sample were able to speak Dutch, only 10% of the Wellington group reported significant ability in this language, which featured only in the repertoires of certain members of the older cohorts. Its regular and frequent use was reported by just 2% of the subjects. Although the subjects from the respective samples had similar ability in their ethnic languages, they differed in their propensity to use them. In the Wellington group these languages appeared to be relatively under-utilized. This was partially explicible by social differences between the samples, particularly the higher incidence of inter-ethnic marriages. The functional differentiation of the regional languages from Indonesian appeared far less clear-cut in the Wellington sample, suggesting that the range of uses served by the national language is continuing to grow and extend beyond its officially designated functions and traditional role of mediating inter-ethnic communication. Most of the hard data on which this investigation is based were collected by means of a questionnaire, which was administered to a sample of 100 subjects. Quantitative analysis of the multivariate data elicited by the questionnaire was done via analysis of variance and multiple regression. The work also incorporates insights gained during the author's ten years of membership in the community about which he writes.