https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4000-217X
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ABSTRACT
Cross-nationally, urbanization is associated with the decline of minority languages and a shift towards national and official languages. But the processes that link urbanization with language shift have not been adequately documented. In this paper we consider the relationship between cities and language shift from a sociolinguistic perspective, focusing our attention on the issue of language use and language shift in Indonesia – a large, ethnically and linguistically diverse, rapidly urbanising country. We use census data to examine how ethnic diversity shapes language shift in the context of urbanicity. We find that in ethnically homogenous regions, urbanicity itself has little relationship with language shift. By contrast, ethnic diversity is consistently associated with a greater probability of speaking Indonesian both among urban and rural Indonesians and in urban and rural areas. These findings contribute to our understanding of language shift and linguistic vitality in diverse, urbanising societies, and highlight the need to distinguish between the process of urbanization and the state of being urban.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2018). World Urbanization Prospects: The 2018 Revision, Online Edition. Available at: https://esa.un.org/undp/wup/
2 The only exceptions are some of the Malayic languages that are natively spoken in the provinces of Riau, Jambi, and elsewhere in the island of Sumatra and its near islands, as well as in parts of Kalimantan (Indonesisan Borneo) as well. The traditional language of the Betawi people is also a hybrid form of Malay spoken around Jakarta and incorporating elements of Hokkien, Portuguese, Javanese, and other elements not found in other Malayic languages (Ikranagara Citation1980). These languages are mutually intelligible – to greater or lesser degrees – with the standardised Malay form that is Indonesian.
3 The definition of an area as ‘urban’ in the 2010 Census depends on its population density, the percentage of households in the area engaged in agriculture, and access to ‘urban facilities’ such as schools, markets, and hospitals. Every lowest-level administrative unit (equivalent to a village or neighbourhood) in Indonesia is given a numerical score based on these factors, which is then used to code that area as urban or rural (see Badan Pusat Statistik Citation2010 for a description). Individuals are then assigned the status of residing in an urban area or not based on whether their area of residence is urban or rural.
4 The 2010 census itself does record the name of the language that the respondent reports using at home, but those data are not made publicly available for researcher use.
5 These predictions, obtained using the margins command in Stata 17, correspond to ‘predictive margins’ that average over the observed values of the other covariates in the sample.