Languages of Java

Abstract

Abstract This chapter discusses key linguistic features of the major indigenous languages and varieties spoken on the island of Java, Indonesia, including Javanese, Madurese, Sundanese, Baduy, Banyumas, Osing, Cirebon, Banten, and Tengger, which together comprise for close to 60% of the speaker population of Indonesia. The use of speech levels—stemming historically from Javanese—characterize the larger languages, although their present-day use indicates a change in progress which no longer emphasizes the past social hierarchy. The modern languages of Java are characterized typologically by SVO default word order, no case marking, a reduced number of voice marking distinctions, and applicativization. Their phonemic vowel and consonant inventories are considered larger within Austronesian, and typically have vowel harmony, homorganic nasal substitution, and no lexical stress. Noteworthy specific phonological features include gemination in Madurese, progressive nasalization in Sundanese, tense vs. lax stops in Javanese, and patalization and diphthongization in Osing. Important morphological features of the languages of Java include reduplication across all grammatical categories and multifunctional affixes, while variation is found across language varieties in terms of their synthetic-analytic characterization. These languages also have rich number of tense, aspect, modality/evidentiality adverbs or auxiliaries, which optionally modify the predicate, and include phasal polarity. Prominent morphosyntactic features include subject-only restriction for relativization or cleft constructions (lifted in some varieties), and various combinatorial strategies to form polar questions, including discourse particles, word order variation, and intonation.