A thousand kilometres away: sociolinguistic variation
in the urban sign language varieties of Indonesia (BSL)
The Indonesian cities of Solo and Makassar are situated 1,000 kilometres apart on the islands of Java and
Sulawesi respectively. This paper compares the sign language varieties used in these cities for the
domains of completion, number and negative constructions, using qualitative and multivariate analysis to
assess the degree and nature of lexical and morphosyntactic variation. The research uses a corpus of
conversational data, from which 90 minutes of data have been transcribed in each location; the sample
comprises 40 signers (balanced for region, sex and age).
Instantiations of the completive aspect are highly frequent in the data corpus, perhaps because
completion is an important cultural concept in Indonesia (Purwo 2011). There are 299 tokens of the
completive aspect, and four lexical variants have been identified – e.g. (1), (2). All variants occur in both
varieties, and behave in similar ways, for example all variants can be encliticized (1), (3).
Multivariate analysis suggests that location is not significant for the completive variable, but that other
predictor variables such as the age and sex of the signer, the syntactic slot, and the previous realisation of
the variable are significant. There is also a high degree of intra-individual variation, with some signers
using all four variants in the course of one conversation; in some cases there is a convincing explanation
for the choice of variant (such as accommodation, or phonological influence from the previous segment),
while in other cases the reason is not clear.
Grammatical similarities between the SL varieties of Solo and Makassar can be explained in terms of
contact between deaf people in different regions of Indonesia – the first deaf schools were established in
Java in the 1930s, and since then the amount of contact between SL users has grown, through deaf
organisation, social/sports events and, recently, communications technology. Negative constructions
have been found to be grammatically similar in India (Zeshan 2006) and the situation in Indonesia
appears to be comparable.
How do these findings relate to previous research on Indonesian SL varieties? A study by Isma (2012)
compares the SL varieties of Jakarta and Yogyakarta using the lexicostatistical methods described by
Woodward (2011), and argues that these varieties are different languages in the same ‘language family’.
If applied to the Solo and Makassar varieties, lexicostatistical methods would obtain similar findings.
However, these methods have not been used for the current study because they fail to capture
sociolinguistic phenomena such as inter- and intra-individual variation. Given the degree of lexical and
grammatical variation, the elicitation of a single token for each item on a wordlist does not give the full
picture.
While documentation is hugely valuable for sign communities, I suggest that the delimitation of SLs is
essentially a socio-political matter. Rather than seeking to name new SLs on the basis of findings from any
research method, the views of SL communities should be prioritised, and researchers have a key role to
play in raising the metalinguistic awareness of sign communities (de Vos & Palfreyman 2012).
Examples
The completive has been glossed SUDAH, after “sudah”, an Indonesian word which ‘usually indicates that an action
has occurred or that a state has been achieved’, (Sneddon 2010:204). (^) indicates the clitic form of the variable.
(1)
GIRL^SUDAH-2 MEET PT:PRO2 SUDAH-2
‘Have you already met the girl?’
(2)
SUDAH-1 WEDDING-RING MARRY SUDAH-3
‘[We will] already have married…’
(3)
(Solo)
mouthing:
RH-gloss:
LH-gloss:
PT:PRO3
(Makassar)
_
sudah .
MARRY^SUDAH-3
MARRY--------------
‘She is already married.’
(Solo)
References
de Vos, Connie and Nick Palfreyman. (2012). Review of Gaurav Mathur, and Donna Jo Napoli 'Deaf around the
world: The impact of language'. Journal of Linguistics, 48, pp 731-735
Isma, Silva Tenrisara Pertiwi (2012). Signing Varieties in Jakarta and Yogyakarta: Dialects or Separate Languages?
M.A. dissertation, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Purwo, Bambang Kaswanti (2011). ‘SUDAH in contemporary Indonesian’. Presentation at the International
Symposium on Malay/Indonesian Linguistics, Malang, Java, Indonesia. 24 June 2011.
Sneddon, James (2010). Indonesian: A Comprehensive Grammar (second edition). Abingdon: Routledge.
Woodward, James (2011). ‘Some observations on research methodology in lexicostatistical studies of sign
languages’ in Gaurav Mathur & Donna Jo Napoli (Eds.) Deaf around the world: The impact of language. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Zeshan, Ulrike (2006). Interrogative and negative constructions in sign languages. Nijmegen: Ishara Press.