Peranakan Chinese Speech and Identity

Abstract

It is perhaps not well known and certainly not a salient fact to outsiders that the Chinese of Central Java have their own speech which is peculiar to themselves and not used by other populations resident there. The are the people of Chinese descent who have been long-settled in Java and are not native speakers of a Chinese language. The designation Peranakan is opposed to the term which refers to the Javanese people who do not claim foreign descent. The language is not a different language from the Javanese of the Pribumis. In grammar, morphology, and syntax this speech differs only in minor ways from other typical Javanese dialects (although it is by no means isomorphic with the particular Javanese dialects spoken in Central Java by the Pribumi). In lexicon there are differences, and these differences have a role as indicators of ethnic and class identity. First, there is a small number of forms of Chinese origin not used by the Pribumi, and these are salient because of their meanings and high frequencyof use. Being of Chinese origin, specific to the Peranakan, and deployed in in-group speech, they clearly are used to place the speaker and the interlocutor as ethnic Peranakan.1 Second, there is a another set of forms of Dutch origin, of high frequency in but not normally found in Pribumi speech, and these can be found in conversations with interlocutors of any ethnicity. The motivation for the existence of these forms can be undertstood from the role of Dutch as a prestige language in Indonesia in colonial times.2