Lexical Repository Development for Bugis, a Minority Language

Abstract

The Bugis community migrated from Sulawesi, Indonesia and settled in the Malay Peninsula in the seventeenth century as a minority community. As a minority community in a new territory which was dominated by a more powerful community, the use of their mother tongue in communication within a family and other public domain has been non-dominant and has been shifted to Malay. With this regard, this research intends to investigate the factors that have led the Bugis community to shift their language to Malay. Due to language shift, the Bugis language has become non-dominant and is currently facing rapid attrition. Therefore, this research also attempts to contribute knowledge about Bugis language loss by developing a lexical repository for the language. In order to accomplish this motive, observation and interviews were carried out in a number of Bugis villages in Johore and Selangor in Malaysia; to find out the factors which led to the language shift. On the other hand, the development of the repository was done by collecting a large number of words through Rapid Word Collection (RWC) based on the semantic domains. Currently, as many as five thousand words have already been collected and included in the repository. The development of this lexical repository can help in storing as many Bugis lexical items as possible. Storing these items can help in preserving this minority language that is nearly extinct.