Constructing Identity and Language Vitality of Minority Language: Evidence from Loloan-Malay

Abstract

This paper reports our preliminary sociolinguistic research on the ethnicity, identity and language vitality in minority language maintenance, taking Loloan Malay in East Loloan village as a case study. Loloan Malay was originally only spoken by the Moslems but at the moment it is also acquired as a native language and used as the means of communication by the Moslems and non-Moslems in this village. This language is well maintained in various situations although it is frequently mixed with the lexicon from its contact languages, Balinese, Bugis, and Indonesian, Arabic, even English. The data was collected through ethnography and extended interviews with samples based on the three groups, namely teenagers, adults, and housewives. They were chosen because they are most responsible to the language maintenance and language sustainability. Our study provides fresh empirical evidence for the significance of Loloan Malay as a symbolic linguistic tool, playing a central role for group-internal and group-external identity, giving rise to sustainable language vitality. Our findings also confirm with the current theoretical paradigm in sociolinguistic research that social group identity is multi-faceted with ethnicity and religion are just two among complex variables, that performance of such identity is on-going, socially constructed and enforced, and that social identity plays a key role in language maintenance.