Discourse Particles in the Internet Jakartan Indonesian (CJI)
Chances are that you’ve seen this meme, right? I’m not sure exactly when it went viral but this is one of the most interesting things about language. You write it very formally in emails, speak it formally in speeches, some meetings, but in a casual environment, we speak it very differently. Why? Here we’ll try to answer that. But first, a preface.
It has been awhile since I last wrote about Linguistics (or anything!), I have been adjusting myself to life as a “white-collar” and even with work from home policy, I needed some time to adjust (and sort of, divvy my energy so that I don’t feel very tired after work). Right now I’m trying to come up with schedules that would help me publish posts once every month, so stay tuned! If you’d like to read my previous posts, they are up on onwardzine.com, a platform for English UNPAD students to write about everything. Now, let’s talk about colloquial language!
“Lah”, “Sih”, and “Dong” are few of the common sounds that we hear daily when we speak informal Indonesian — particularly in Jakarta. Linguist James Neil Sneddon called it Colloquial Jakartan Indonesian in his book with the same title that was released in 2006. Colloquial Jakartan Indonesian (CJI, for short) is a colloquial language, meaning conversational and informal. Apparently, the way we write and speak can be highly different. For instance, we could write in Standard English “I’m going to the park” but we can also say “Imma go to the park” or “I’m gonna go to the park”. These are what we call colloquial and this form of English is called Colloquial English.
In Indonesian, the differences are more saturated. Note that Indonesian is originally deliberately planned, both by the colonial Dutch government before independence and later by Indonesian high officials through the Ministry of Education and Culture. This deliberate planning grew Indonesian into having 2 varieties — a phenomenon noted by Charles Ferguson as diglossia, that is a situation where a language is ‘highly codified’ for the purposes of written and formal but are not used in ordinary conversation. If you speak Indonesian, this notion might have already sparked an ‘Oh!’ in your eyes, as obviously you have noticed that there are differences in the way we talked in a formal meeting (say, a thesis defense) compared to when we were just hanging out with friends sipping cups of coffee. Ferguson categorised these varieties into two, H variety a.ka Formal Indonesian and L variety a.ka Colloquial Indonesian. If you’re interested in learning more about the differences between CJI and Formal Indonesian, I highly suggest to pick up Sneddon’s book as it’s very thorough in its explanation.
Now that we’ve understood CJI and its role, what are discourse particles then? According to Platt in 1987 and later on expanded by Ajimer and Simon-Vandenbergen in 2003, is a linguistic unit (think of it like a “word” but way more easily definable and specified, because to explain a word — is to explain what is before the big bang) that conveys more than what is said to help the conversation flow smoothly (as in, the listeners understand us what we mean). In English, the most common ones that we hear lately are “Like” e.g. “Do you know what I mean? Like just turn right before the red light.” or “You know” e.g. “Double cheeseburgers, you know.. the one that has two burgers instead of one.” As you might have noticed, these particles mean differently than what they originally intended. These particles don’t necessarily have individual meaning, but they have specific purposes depending on the circumstances they are used. What about CJI? Well, for fun purposes. Let’s take a look at one of the podcasts hosted by Deddy Corbuzier entitled “BINTANG EMON DARI GA SENGAJA SAMPE NARKOBA🔴” (“Bintang Emon By Accident To Narcotics” [I also don’t know what it means..]). Feel free to watch the video below, I didn’t take the entire transcript apart (that would be too exhaustive for this short blog), so you can also only listen from the beginning to 30 seconds into the podcast (00:00–00:30).
Before we begin, Sneddon has examined that there are so far 15 discourse particles including combinations and its subtypes. It would be boring to thoroughly explain them all (as you can also, like I have suggested, to check out his book), so let’s take a look at the podcast. The table below shows the rough time stamp when the speech is said, with speaker and the speech itself occupying the second and third column respectively.
8 seconds into the podcast, Bintang argued with Deddy that Deddy only contacts him whenever Bintang falls into a scandal, while there is no discourse particle that was used in Bintang’s speech. Deddy’s reply, on the other hand, contains 4 discourse particles, ya kan being a combination instead of separate, as we will later discuss.
“Lah, gak dong gua kan sering chat lu, ya kan”
dp not dp I dp often text you dp dp
What? That’s not true I often text you, right?”
As we see in the above speech and its word-by-word translation as well as localisation, lah is another form of loh, which according to Sneddon is a particle that’s derived from the Javanese lho. Loh is pronounced /lθh/ or /loh/ and it is to indicate an expression of surprise to what was said if placed before a statement. Lah itself is pronounced pretty straightforwardly /lah/ or /læh/ and since it is put before a statement, lah here is to indicate an expression of surprise from the speaker.
The next particle is dong, Sneddon stated that dong, pronounced /doN/, occurs to give strong emphasis that is used when the listener should have known what is said. In the above speech, dong is used to emphasise that Bintang’s speech is not true, another characteristic of dong is that it makes the statement more empathetic and to avoid the confrontation becoming too aggressive.
Kan, pronounced /kan/ is a particle that is extremely common (and has been exclusively researched in detail by Wouk in 1998), and believed to be the most frequently used of all the particles. There are three possible variances of kan, the first is for requesting verification or seeking confirmation, the second is to remind the listener of “a piece of shared knowledge”, similar to “you know”, and lastly just to create “atmosphere of social solidarity and intimacy”. The third variant is interesting, as even the first and second variant can also have the characteristics of the third. In the above speech, kan falls to the second option, as it is used by the speaker to inform the listener of a shared knowledge, that is — the fact that the speaker texted the listener often.
Previously, I’ve stated that ya kan is categorised as one, Sneddon suggests that it’s possible that the combination (meaning that two particles appear very closely), may create a contradictory emphasis or colouring. In this case, the particle ya, pronounced /ja/, is used to seek for confirmation and kan, which also has the characteristic to seek for confirmation, this colours the meaning and therefore kan acts as the emphasis to ya.
20 seconds in, Deddy said that something always happens when they are just about to host a podcast, and Bintang agreed with the statement imagining as if he is destined to attend. Below is the translated version:
Deddy:
“Kenapa saat melakukan podcast selalu ada apa gitu ya”
Why when do podcast always there are things thus dp
Why is it that whenever we want to host a podcast something happens?
Bintang:
“He eh, kayak ditakdirin gue tuh main ke sini”
Yes dp dp destined I dp play to here
Right, like, like I am destined to attend
Notice that there are two other particles, another variant of ya (as opposed to the previous intention which is to seek for information) and tuh, which we will discuss later on. Ya, similar to the third characteristic of kan, is also used as an intimacy device, to which Sneddon stated that it “draws the listener by making them feel as if they share knowledge of what is being conveyed when new information is given.” Tuh, on the other hand, is used similarly to dong, that is to put emphasis in the context above. Tuh is pronounced /tuh/.
There are other types not yet discussed such as sih, yuk, masa, mah, and others. But you can see that we use discourse particles almost every time, sometimes even in formal speeches and some discourse particles have special meanings that only appear in accordance to their contexts. As a footnote, CJI is not only limited to Jakartan Indonesian (or even Indonesian) only, as you might have noticed that Sundanese may have adopted one or two particles and that is an interesting idea to look up into.
