Social Dialect between Children and Parents in Children's Short Stories of Bobo Magazine

Abstract

This paper discusses the social dialects of children and parents in the children's short stories in Bobo magazine. Humans often use language variations in the form of social dialects to mark their membership in certain social groups and to express their social identity. This also occurs in the social dialects of children and parents in short stories for children. However, this type of social dialect has never been studied by previous researchers because they mostly discuss regional dialects in literary works or social dialects of adult short stories. This research thus aims at finding out the form of social dialect between children and their parents in children's short stories in Bobo Magazine and also investigating the use of social dialects between children and their parents. Using qualitative content analysis, it was found that the dialect variations were manifested morphologically, syntactically, and lexically. Whereas the uses of social dialects in Bobo magazine were motivated by four aspects, namely: participants, settings, topics, and functions. Further studies on social dialect between children and parents might be expanded to data containing sounds as found in soap operas and films so as to make the four types of variations proposed equally observable.