Competition of Ethnic and National Languages within the Home Domain: Insights from Multilingual Sasak Family Language Choice, Lombok – Indonesia

Abstract

Competition of languages in a bilingual/multilingual society is a prevalent phenomenon found anywhere in the world. Competition occurs when the choice of one language is supposed to be ‘prioritized’ and ‘prized’ over the other(s) in any domain of language use. This study explores how this phenomenon of language use occurs in the homeland of Sasak vernacular speakers living in the city of Mataram, Lombok–Indonesia.  The aim of this study was to investigate the extent to which family members of native Sasak inhabitants in Mataram use their own ethnic language in their daily interaction with their family members in the home, neighborhood, and friendship domains.  Data were collected through survey questionnaires, interviews, and participant observations by employing the concept of Fishman’s domain of language use, language attitude, and bilingualism. The obtained data were then selected, classified, and tabulated to compute the frequency of speech occurrences in each study group. The results show that participants displayed positive attitudes towards their mother tongue indicating that they were very proud of their first language. SL was almost always used in daily conversations in the home domain and neighborhood but the rate of use slightly differed among different age, education, and occupational groups. Societal bilingual patterns were portrayed in the stable use of both the indigenous language (SL) in the home domain and the national language (IL) in the official domain in education, government, or religious gatherings. Within the context of EGIDS by SIL, UNESCO developed from Fishman (1972) SL at present is still safe and maintained by its people.