Contrastive Analysis of Onomatopoeic Use in Nursery Rhymes as Children’s Environmental Sounds Recognition in Japanese and Indonesian

Abstract

Nursery rhymes play a role in children’s language development and help them recognize and express the environmental sounds or sounds around them. Onomatopoeia or imitation words are often found in nursery rhymes. Every country has a different language, so it has different phonetic sounds to express onomatopoeia. In this research, the author will contrast the onomatopoeic use in Japanese and Indonesian nursery rhymes. The theory and classification of onomatopoeia used in this research are combinations proposed by Akimoto (2002) and Kaneda (1978). This qualitative research used the listening and note-taking methods from Youtube videos. The analysis data used in this research are the referential matching method. The result from the research data shows that in Japanese nursery rhymes, onomatopoeia is the sound of nature, the sound from an object, the sound of a human, the sound of an animal, object condition, object movement, human movement, animal movement, and human emotion are found. Meanwhile, in Indonesian nursery rhymes found, almost all types of onomatopoeia in Japanese are found except for the class of the sound of a human, object movement, and human emotion are not found.