The push and pull of languages: Youth written communication across a range of texts in Central Java

Tamtomo, Kristian (2015) The push and pull of languages: Youth written communication across a range of texts in Central Java. NUSA: Linguistic studies of languages in and around Indonesia, 58. ISSN 0126-2874

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Abstract

Youths' multilingual literacy practices constitute sites in which their language use can be pushed and pulled in different directions. This article will investigate how the way youth groups from two vocational high schools in Semarang, Central Java use Javanese, Indonesian and English across different genres of texts reflect the way they negotiate the push and pull of the various language ideologies associated with these languages. In analyzing these texts, the article will adopt a social practice approach to literacy and will also emphasize that there are orders to the indexical meanings of languages. The youths' language use shows that the range of texts form a continuum, in which the more formal texts tend to highly regulated around Indonesian as the monolingual center whereas less formal texts are more open to the use of Javanese and English, including the playful combination and juxtaposition of languages that enable youth to recontextualize and even subvert the dominant indexical meanings associated with these languages.

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