A corpus-based lexical analysis of Indonesian English as a new variety

Abstract

The fact that English has been embraced globally by most countries as a second language has prompted its adoption in various media, such as television and newspaper. As a language is adopted by a community of non-native speakers, a new variety of it tends to emerge due to the influence of the linguistic features of those non-native speakers’ arterial language. In Indonesia, where English is spoken as a second or foreign language, there has been a growing number of newspapers published in it. Along with the trend of world Englishes, this raises a question about the possibility of a new variety called Indonesian English. Even though more and more Indonesian teachers start to realize that the goal of English language teaching is no longer to imitate native speakers’ variety, there is still little research done on the topic of Indonesian English. For that reason, by collecting online data from an English language newspaper published in the country, this research identified the lexical characteristics of English variety used by educated Indonesians. It is basically a corpus-based lexical study that employed Corpus Pattern Analysis (CPA) to describe contextualized data gathered from the online newspaper. The focuses of this study were contextual information about loanwords, word meanings, word forms, and collocations, which are pertinent to the Indonesian variety of English. The findings indicated that the lexical characteristics of Indonesian English could be categorized into roughly four groups, namely: Indonesian-origin loanwords, Indonesian English lexicon resulting from semantic shifts and those from morphological shifts, as well as Indonesian English collocations. By doing so, it is expected that this research can provide a theoretical basis for English teachers in Indonesia to embrace an English-as-a-lingua-franca approach in their instructions and anticipate a new variety that might exist in the future: Indonesian English.

Creating a bilingual dictionary of collocations: A learner-oriented approach

“…A corpus-based lexical analysis allows to reveal, among other things, collocation and phraseological patterns. In this way, the meaning of a word is inferred based on its prototypical use in the concordances (Endarto, 2020).…”

Verb-Governor Based Comparative Analysis on the Move Structure of Abstracts in Six English Varieties

“…In sociolinguistics, "variety" refers to languages of different social or linguistic groups, or different forms of the same language in different countries or regions (Sun, 1989). As a language is adopted by speakers in a new region, a new variety of this language tends to emerge due to the influence of the linguistic features of L1 of those speakers (Endarto, 2020). English produces innovative, regionally distinctive forms and uses of its own, mingled with local languages and cultures in the process of spreading, therefore English varieties appeared (Stockton, 2018).…”

“…(Burdin, 2022;Grabe et al, 2000). At lexical level, some words may have new forms or meanings, and even new words and collocation patterns may come into being in the new variety which may triggered by sociolinguistic factors (Kiaer et al, 2021;Endarto, 2020). The third line of research on language form focuses on the grammatical features of English varieties, especially syntactical features.…”

Demystifying the Morphosyntactic Features of the Tagalog and English Languages: A Contrastive Analysis

“…When students develop a critical awareness of morphosyntax, they will be able to critically determine the meanings of words by deciphering how these words are structured together in the same way that they decipher the meanings of words based on their constituent elements (Endarto, 2020). Additionally, a distinct awareness in this type of study affords the opportunity to become more acquainted with characteristics that are and are not shared by all languages.…”