Abstract
Language shift may lead to language investment, and it may also affect language heritage maintenance. This case study aims to explore maintenance of language heritage among a group of Papuan students who are living in a school dormitory, away from their families. These 29 senior high school students are originally from different ethnic groups from several districts in Papua. A questionnaire and a semi-structured interview video-recorded for data collection were employed to find out the students’ attitudes towards languages and maintenance of heritage languages. The questionnaire was designed and developed by adapting the semi-structured interview questions designed by Berman et al. (2011). The data were analysed based on the aspects organised in the questionnaire and the results were compared with the findings of Berman et al.’s (2011), Ehala and Niglas’s (2006), and Nguyen’s (2018) studies. The result shows that there has been a language shift among these adolescents. Living among a community that is totally different from theirs has driven them to adapt and accept the language used in the community. Technology exposure at school has also affected their perspectives towards their future, which motivates them to invest in other languages that they think are important for their future career. Their positive attitudes towards other languages do not discourage them from maintaining their heritage language, as they perceive the use of heritage language as a way to stay connected with their own culture.
Highlights
Rapid changes all over the world have created a new map of language use that keeps changing as well
The language predominantly used by the students both academically and for social interaction purposes with their parents, siblings, peers, teachers, or other people is the language of the majority—Indonesian—in all the speech domains: classrooms, school, places outside school, dormitory, public religious places, and social media
The language shift may occur because the Papuan adolescents in this study rarely find opportunities to practice using their heritage language (HL) with their families; even when they communicate by phonecalls or WhatsApp they tend to use Indonesian—a similar situation in which parents no longer speak the HL or they find difficulty because of their weak competencies in using HL (Budiyana, 2017)
Summary
Rapid changes all over the world have created a new map of language use that keeps changing as well. There is a chance that people stop using their heritage language as they need to adapt to their new environment for survival. Such dynamic phenomena have always been an interesting issue to study. Other studies relate HL to family language identity (Little, 2020), to religion (Ding and Goh, 2019), to language use with children within language shift between the host and HL used by migrant mothers (Farr et al, 2018), to bilingual identity (Nguyen, 2018), and to literacy, media consumption, and social media (Velázquez, 2017)
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