Slamet Setiawan
Javanese is a language spoken by most people in East and Central Java. Javanese iswell known as a language with three speech levels: kromo'high level', madya'middle level',and ngoko'low level'. The use of Javanese in a metropolitan city, Surabaya is greatly decreasing because of the domination of Bahasa Indonesia as a national language. This phenomenon leads up the elementary students in Surabaya to use Bahasa Indonesia rather than Javanese. This study is based on the phenomena of language shift among Javanese elementary school students at the age of 7-11 years old in the metropolitan city, Surabaya.It is common among Javanese families these days that their children use the national language, Bahasa Indonesia, instead of their ethnic language. Javanese even becomes the second language. The result shows the domination of Indonesian is almost in all students' language domains. Although Javanese is still used, the students mostly speak the low variety of Javanese. The difficulties in adhering to Javanese speech levels become one of the basic reasons for choosing Indonesian. However, identifying the language shift phenomenon without searching out for the effort of language maintenance is not enough. Thus, thisis also to seek some efforts done by Javanese people in preserving or maintaining their indigenous language including the attitudes toward their languages. Although Indonesian dominates, the positive attitudes toward Javanese are still shown by the parents. © 2020 Asian EFL Journal Press. All rights reserved.
Universitas Negeri Surabaya, Indonesia
