Indonesian TV anchors’ final -k sound shift: The nature and the cause

This study aimed, firstly, to observe the phonological change of the Standard Indonesian (SI), particularly the final-k syllabic pronunciation used in the journalistic videos aired between 1980 – 2019. Secondly, the study investigated the nature of the sound change by taking into account the theories of Lexical Diffusion. Lastly, the plausibly cause of the sound change was figured out, considering the sociolinguistic factors; orthographic re-regulation, post-colonial language policy, borrowing, and contacts. Methodologically, it is a diachronic study using a set of television news videos as the main source of data. A battery of findings from other related studies was employed to support the discussion on the nature and the reason of for the sound change. The results show that the phonological shift of coda /ʔ/ ~ /k/ happened to most final -k syllabic words across the periods observed, but with varying degrees of rapidity, where the high-frequency words tend to be more sustained. The results also indicated that phonological shift of coda /ʔ/ ~ /k/ that occurred in the Indonesian TV-broadcast language was transferred from the Jakartan dialect, although some evidence of the 1972’s alphabetic writing system reformation also plays a considerable role in the TV News readers’ final -k sound shift.


INTRODUCTION
The influential role of the language used in media around the world has been reported in several studies (Dynia et al., 2021;Jimirro, 1968;Wang et al., 2005). People speaking Dutch and Mandarin, to illustrate, look up to the news reporter language to acquire the standard accent (Jimirro, 1968;Wang et al., 2005). English in the United Kingdom has BBC English as the standard, and English in America named their unmarked accent as General American (GA). Although different programs will elicit different levels of registers, context, and styles (Anggraini & Sudiran, 2014;Holmes, 2008;Sederberg, 2021), television, in general, is a powerful tool to change a language.
Similarly, the Indonesian language used in media has also been playing a pivotal role in modelling the proper form of the national language. Thus, it is normal for the Indonesian people nowadays to consult the news reporter's dialect on TV for the standard language style. From the preliminary observation on the old videos of Indonesian TV news programs, the researcher found that the Standard Indonesian used in the broadcasting context has shifted in the aspect of final-syllabic plosive sound. Some 1980s anchors were spotted to pronounce the words duduk or untuk as /duduʔ/ and /untuʔ/ in journalism. However, nowadays, most news reporters and broadcasters would uniformly pronounce the final -k syllabic words as /duduk/ and /untuk/, with voiceless /k/ differed from their daily Indonesian dialect, [ʔ], indicating the tendency to copy the SI pronunciation modelled in the national media.
Many recent linguistic studies have looked at plosive sounds. An instrumental study by Kharlamov (2018), for example, analysed the prevoicing and prenasalization in Rusia plosive sounds. Jacewicz and Fox (2019) conducted a sociophonetic analysis on an American English vernacular language of Appalachian and found that the dialect the older generation realised voiced stop closure with a greater magnitude of voicing. There is also a study by Kavitskaya (2021) that investigated the phonetic motivation for the lenition of velar and labial stops to affricate and fricative sounds using a wide range of languages. Besides, many other studies look at variations within a speech community to spot an undergoing sound change (Bang et al., 2018;D'Onofrio et al., 2019;Kuang & Cui, 2018;Lee & Jongman, 2019). Thus, building on the existing literature, the present study aimed to observe the shift of the place of the articulator from voiceless glottal to voiceless velar in the Indonesian final -k syllable pronunciation.
The [ʔ] >[k] sound change phenomena in Indonesian Standard language is merely been tracked thus not yet studied extensively. Irnanda et al. (2021) assumed that the -ik and -ek Indonesian syllabic types change more rapidly from the glottal to the velar form compared to the -ak and -uk syllabic words. However, the rapidity of change occurring in the SI dialect used by the news reporters, who are considered the professional users of the dialect, has not been studied. Which words change faster, or slower? And what are the factors that determine the pace and the manner of the change? Chen and Wang (1975) propose a theory called 'Lexical Diffusion' to explain a process of phonemic redistribution spreading randomly through the vocabulary. The rate of the change can be led by the low frequent items (Phillips, 2006), or the high frequent ones (Dinkin, 2008;Schleef, 2013). The constrained frequency effect, where the phonological shape is more important than the level of word frequency is also common (Hotta, 2013;Yang, 2015). Figuring out the nature of the /ʔ/ ~ /k/ sound change occurring in the Indonesian language can deepen the researchers' understanding of the density of the Indonesian dialects and the development of the standard language, especially on the phonological aspect. Using lexical diffusion as the theoretical framework, the second objective of the present study was to investigate the nature of the Indonesian final -k sound change by considering both the word frequency and the phonological context effects.
Meanwhile, the sociolinguistic reason of what causes this [-ʔ]>[-k] sound change to occur within the SI of TV News media is also still unclear. Formerly, the SI was a High-Malay (Sukesti, 2015), or the Malay dialect used in royal courts, political correspondences, and in books and Islamic academic context from the 16 until 19th century (Ansaldo, 2010;Gallop, 2015;Soderberg & Olson, 2008). As its language predecessor, SI also holds a high level of status and formality, both in written and spoken forms. In casual situations, people speak only the Indonesian colloquial dialects which are mutually intelligible to one another (Ansaldo, 2010;Goebel, 2002;Kurniawan, 2018). As a consequence, the SI competence can only be acquired through getting involved in and exposed to formal situations like academic activities (Kurniawan, 2018).
For many Indonesians, in speech context, as long as the grammatical rules have been adhered to, then one can claim him/herself to have used the SI, although in many cases, the speech still reflects the person's background language or dialect. Yet when it comes to journalism, where the ethnical identity issue is regarded as a thoughtful matter, the pronunciation of the reporter becomes an important aspect to be scrutinised as an effort to maintain the media neutrality in public. According to Booher (2005), for the sake of clarity, a broadcaster should pay attention to their tempo, pronunciation, and their dialectal influence. Nevertheless, the SI has never had a definite standard accent (Adib, 2019;Kurniawan, 2018).
In addition, since Indonesian is a transparent alphabetic language with almost one-to-one letterphoneme correspondences (Irnanda, 2019;Winskel & Widjaja, 2007), reading aloud, the activity normally done by the news reporters, tends to rely on phoneme-based information, especially for the low-frequent or alien words. Thus, the anchors' pronunciation might be influenced by the word's orthographic information. According to Indonesian orthographic regularities, every final -k words, e.g., duduk and tidak, are supposed to be realised as /duduʔ/ and /tidaʔ/.
Nevertheless, from the preliminary study of witnessing the current trend, news anchors would produce the first word duduk and tidak, as /duduk/ and /tidak/ with velar instead of the glottal final sound. Meanwhile, although in the Jakartan and Sundanese dialects, the velar variant is also used for the two example words above, in many other Indonesian dialects, such as the East Java, Aceh, and North Sumateran, the words are produced with the glottal variant (add citation(s) please). Based on these existing facts, the fading of the variant [-ʔ] in journalism might be caused by the Jakartan dialect influence. In the past, the final [k] variant might have been absorbed into the Jakartan dialect from one of the languages; Sundanese, Balinese, Javanese, Portuguese, Dutch and Arabic (Nothofer, 1991;Sneddon, 2006), thus wiping off the Malay-original variant of [-ʔ] except only in few words like tidak, bapak, kakek, or kakak. This presumption is strengthened by Kurniawan's (2018) study that analysed the corpus of Jakartan three generations. The study reported that the high variety of the Indonesian language, or SI, has a reciprocal relationship with the JI (Jakartan Indonesian), the most popular vernacular form of the Bahasa Indonesia. In other words, SI and JI are the same speakers who resided in the Jakarta area and speak both the low and high dialects in their daily life. Is the spread of the final [-k] variant in most of the final -k words spoken in speech journalistic caused by the reporters' JI dialect? Or is it the Indonesian government alteration of the finalk words orthographic rule in 1947 that has triggered the change? The present study attempts to answer this question by analysing the orthographic evidence in the past from various sources and other relevant research findings.

METHOD
This is a diachronic study using Indonesian news broadcast videos collected from various YouTube channels as the main source of data. The videos represented four 10-year periods; (a) 1980 to 1989; (b) 1990 to 1999, (c) 2000 -2009, and (d) 2010 to 2019. Each period consisted of four videos, making a total of 16 videos used in analysis altogether.

Data Selection Criteria
Each video was checked for its date of air. The videos included only those documenting news program which was broadcast nationally, not locally, and from both the government and private TV channels. The informants in the videos were male and female TV anchors and reporters aged approximately between 20 -40 years old. Voices from sources other than these two professions (anchors and reporters), e.g., interviewees, were not analysed.

Data Analysis Transcription
Each video was played one at a time and transcribed into EYD spelling system using Google Doc Voice Typing feature. Firstly, each video was played for the voice typing process, and after that, the transcription is checked, edited and verified by one of the researchers who was a native speaker of Indonesia to ensure the accuracy of the transcription.

Labelling
After the videos turned into audio texts, the texts were labelled for all the final-k syllables. Words containing a final-k type of syllable were highlighted in every text. Any final -k words with an -an suffix were not labelled, as in this case, the sound was not a coda but the onset for syllable kan.
To illustrate, words that spelt [perbaikan] and [kebanyakan], from stems baik and banyak, were not labelled as in the speech forms, the words are segmented as per-ba-i-kan and ke-ba-nya-kan.

Phonetic Analysis
The data analysis method employed was phonetic analysis, specifically using the phonetic auditory analysis in which a sound is analyzed the way it is heard and interpreted. The analysis was done using a binary technique where the token word was labelled to either /ʔ/, /k/ or /Ø/, based on the speaker's speech production. Then, the variants across the periods were presented and compared. The results are then discussed (1) within the context of the regularity of sound change distribution by taking into account the Lexical Diffusion (Chen & Wang, 1975), and (2) in regard to the cause of the change by looking at the orthographic and language contact factors.

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
There were three important questions that the researchers wanted to address: the first one is how the final -k syllabic words are pronounced by the Indonesian TV anchors across the four decades, starting from 1980-2019. The other two questions deal with how and why those pronunciation change occurred. For the first research question, the discussion will be classified into two lexical categories: the function and the content words. Afterwards, the other two research questions, regarding the nature and the cause of the change are discussed respectively.

The Change of the Final -k Words Pronunciation The Function Words
From the data, only five final -k function words were found. They are tidak, tak, (both have the same meaning 'not'), untuk 'to', hendak 'should', and yakni 'namely'. According to LLC corpus (2013), the words tidak, tak, untuk, hendak and yakni in Table 1 can be categorised as relatively high in frequency. The percentage of the variants for each observed function word is alsp presented in Table 1. The word tidak is highly encountered across the texts. And based on the percentage of the variants produced, /ʔ/ form is highly realised (100%) across the first three-segmented-periods (See Table 1, Row 1). It can be assumed that the word's phonological form is sustained for almost the whole observed time. However, in the latest period, or between 2010-2019, a variant of /k/ appears, although only once, or about 9% from the 11 occurrences recorded. This velar form of tidak might have happened accidentally, perhaps influenced by the orthography. As reported in several studies, orthographic forms do affect one's pronunciation (Adda-Decker & Lamel, 1999;Bassetti & Atkinson, 2015). As the Indonesian writing system is highly transparent and phonemebased (Irnanda, 2019;Winskel & Widjaja, 2007), the word-decoding process occurs on the subphonological rather than lexical level, thus phonological error in reading aloud is not unusual.  (10)  9 (1) tak 0 (0) 0 (0) 100 (12) 0 (0) 100 (2) 0 (0) 100 (2) 0 (0) untuk 90.32 (28) 9.67 (3) 17.14 (6) 82.86 (29) 100 (40) (2) Nevertheless, still, on highly frequent word, like tidak, phonological errors are rarely committed, especially by adult readers. Alternatively, the error could be a sub-lexical error, where the reporter got influenced by the other orthographically similar words to tidak such as; bidak, bedak or, sidak. In other words, the anchor might not mean to produce tidak in that velar-ending manner because the word allows only one variant across the Indonesian dialects.
Meanwhile, similarly, its synonym, tak, was also found to be as resilient as the word tidak, where only /ʔ/ form is used across the observed time segments. In contrast, the /ʔ/ variant of another high-frequent function word, untuk, is produced in relatively high number in the first observed decade, but then shifted drastically, in only 10 years, into /k/ variant in 1990 onwards. In the two latest decades, none of /untuʔ/ variants is found used anymore by any TV anchors and/or reporters. Unlike the word tidak that seems to be highly resistant, the word untuk has fully changed into the velar-ending variant by the 1990s. The other function words, hendak and yakni, which are categorised as low-frequent, are found to be phonetically progressing, too. The word hendak, for instance, was still pronounced with both variants in the TV news until the 1990s, and the word yakni, until the 1980s. Afterwards, the word yakni is found uttered once in the latest time segment, using the /k/ variant. None of the words hendak found in the 2000 onward corpus.
From the 16 content words observed, there are five words pronounced the same way across the four periods. They are: laksana, baik, duduk, masuk and bentuk, all are produced with [k] variant uniformly. Yet, there are eight words change, from multivariant of [-ʔ] and [-k] sounds in the first twenty years to only one the [-k] variant in the latter twenty periods. Those words are: tolak, anak, banyak, pihak, tampak, rakyat, gerak, and sejak. These two types of trends provide a hint that some final syllabic content words have established their [-k] variant pronunciation long ago, while some others have just finished their alteration recently.

The Diffusion of the Final Syllabic [-k] across the Indonesian Journalistic Lexicons
It seems that, within the forty years, the Indonesian broadcasting language becoming more exclusive in terms of phonology. It transforms gradually into a special language style, restricting only a plosive /k/ sound for every final -k syllable, except for some highly resistant words like tidak, bapak, and some others.
The frequency level is not the ultimate factor that determines the speed of the change. The data from the function words show that two words with approximately equal levels of frequency, tidak and untuk have a contrastive level of resistance to change (see Table 1). This is to some extent is parallel to what was found by Irnanda et al. (2021), that the frequency effect applies when the syllable position, nucleus and onset are considered.
In particular, this study supports the lowfrequent-lead hypothesis, which believes the lower frequent words change earlier than the higher ones (Phillips, 2006). In other words, this News Anchors' SI case disapproves of the high-frequent hypothesis (Dinkin, 2008).
Words ended with [-uk] and [-ik] lexical formation seem to shift to velar variant first, then those with [-ak] ones, which are also consistent with the findings of that Irnanda et al. (2021), that the [ak] formation is the latest to change, while the [-ik] and [-ek] are the first. Regarding the position of the syllable, the present study to some extent also consistent with Irnanda et al. (2021), where the results are mixed, depending on the lexical phonological context. The word rakyat shifted completely into the velar variant in the SI anchors' language by the year 2000, but was still found used by the anchors in the 1990s. Meanwhile, the word velar variant of maksud has established its form much earlier proven by none of the glottal variants found within the older periods. However, these two words are borrowed words from Arabic and were originally different in terms of the mid consonant phoneme in its original language. Maksud is ‫صود‬ ْ ‫ق‬ َ ‫م‬ with uvular /q/ sound, while rakyat is pharyngeal /¿/. In short, the pronunciation of the final -k syllabic words in Indonesian news anchors' speech, especially those of the lower-frequent words, almost entirely dominated by the velar variant /k/ in the last twenty years, including the Arabic loanwords which are originally pronounced with a non-velar variant in their original language.
The discussion about the possible loanwords' phonotactic fits such this will be elaborated in the next section when the factors of the change will be discussed in depth.

The Causes of the Final [-k] Syllabic Sound Change across the Periods The Orthographic Factor
The first effort to Romanise the Indonesian language was done by Van Ophuysen (Oetomo & Oetomo, 1991;Putra & Triyono, 2018), a Dutch linguist who mapped out the Indonesian language into alphabets in 1901. Before that, for hundreds of years, Malay was written in an Arabic-based alphabet system called Jawi. The Ophuysen Roman spelling was designed to help the Dutch people to read Malay, thus; the consonant and vowel sounds were all determined by the Dutch Roman version. For example, the letter [j] in Dutch Latin is pronounced as /j/, so any /j/ sound in Indonesian Malay at that time was transcribed with [j] letter, such as: kaja, ajam, and rajoe, mean 'king', 'chicken', and 'persuade', of which when are transcribed in the Indonesian current spelling become: kaya, ayam and rayu. Regarding the vowel, since [oe] digraph in Dutch Latin is pronounced as /u/, [oe] digraph was used in The Ophuysen's Spelling for Indonesian Malay /u/ sound. Words such as: baru, satu, or tua, were respectively transcribed as: baroe, satoe and toea in The Ophuysen's spelling.
Post-1945 Independence year, The Soewandi's spelling was constructed by the Indonesian government in 1947 to diminish this Dutch orthographic influence. However, despite the major changes made on the spelling, the poor language planning at the time had hindered the new spelling to be exercised by the Indonesian speakers.
Only during the Soeharto era, the Indonesian standard spelling can be exercised more widely. The government at that time invigorated the 1972's EYD Spelling or translated as The Enhanced Spelling, to all formal institutions, including schools and offices. It is after the implementation of this language policy that the orthographic rule altering the apostrophe to a final -k can be more informed to more citizens, thus becoming a norm. Despite the major changes made by Soewandi in 1947, without the 1972 spelling reform and language policy, the alteration of the apostrophe with letter [k] could not be exercised widely by the Indonesian speakers.
Although the Indonesian orthography is transparent, a non-native of Indonesian will still find the current alphabetical system insufficiently direct in the aspect of the plosive /ʔ/ and /k/ sounds and their correspondence letters. Plosive glottal /ʔ/ sound in Indonesian is complicated as the sound is represented employing various methods in print. Officially, or based on the formal regulation of EYD spelling, the letter k is used for the final glottal sound regardless of the words. Dialectical differences allow a word to be pronounced differently. A word that is glottal in one dialect can be non-glottal (Ø) in the others. For instance, the word juga, means 'too', is glottal in some casual regional dialects (Acehnese, Sundanese, and East Javanese), but non-glottal in the casual dialects spoken in the eastern part of the country, such as; Sulawesi, Papua, including that in the Standard Indonesian dialect.
Meanwhile, some words are voiceless glottal /ʔ/ in one dialect, but a voiceless velar /k/ in the other. For instance, the word duduk is glottal /ʔ/ in Aceh and the East-Java dialects, but a velar /k/ in the Jakarta, Betawi, and Sundanese dialects. The spelling for each word is continuously standardised by the government through updating the Great Dictionary of Indonesian Language or Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia (KBBI). However, as the complex dialects and the dynamic change of the Standard language, the written-oral relationship of letter [k] and the final-syllabic glottal /ʔ/ in the orthographic system has never become consistent.
Although it is not written explicitly in Kurniawan's thesis (2018) about this particular pattern shift, it is narrated in it that the Malay used in Batavia, or now-Jakarta is a Malay dialect originally spoken in Bangka island (Nothofer, 1991) but received a complex multi-influence from other languages spoken in the area then, such as; Portuguese, Chinese, Arabic, Sundanese, Javanese and Balinese (Kurniawan, 2018;Muhadjir, 1981). This Malay dialect formed in Batavia is called the Betawi dialect, and the speakers are referred to with the same name.
There is a possibility that the formation of Betawi dialect influenced the SI phonological characteristics. The SI dialect was becoming more and more distinct to the MM dialect, or any similar Sumatran dialects spoken during the Ophuysen's Spelling was founded.
From a newspaper front page published in 1944, it is found that an apostrophe was used in words ra'yat, tida', and ta', indicating that these words, in the SI back then, were glottal. Interestingly, on the same page, words like paksa, baik, and roesak, were all transcribed with a letter k instead of an apostrophe, indicating the onset of the shift /ʔ/ ~ /k/. Soewandi might have captured this /ʔ/ ~ /k/ final-syllabic shift and found it no longer relevant for some words to be written with an apostrophe. Alternatively, he might have wanted to remove the apostrophe due to impracticality, by generalising the sound /k/ and /ʔ/ using only one symbol [k].
The motivation behind Soewandi's spelling reform of the final-syllabic glottal stop /ʔ/ is unknown. If that was impracticality, thus it added sound-spelling inconsistency in the orthographic system. However, if it was due to a new language phenomenon, or the Betawi final voiceless velar /k/ influence, thus the Soewandi's final -k spelling might help the change to distribute to other lexicons more easily. And perhaps, as news anchors 'readaloud' the SI text given to them, there was a tendency to read the word sub-lexically, letter by letter, thus causing them to produce sound /k/ for every [k] letter.
To illustrate, the word rakyat means 'people' that was borrowed perhaps between the 12-17 AD from the Arabic ‫,رعية‬ has the original pronunciation of /raʔ. jat/ or /raʕ.jat/. After Malay was Romanised and the Indonesian country was founded in 1945, the word was typed differently by the mass media. For example, in a newspaper in the Java island, the word was spelt ra'jat, and in another newspaper in North Sumatera, it was spelt rajat. The 1972 spelling reform then standardised it to rakyat. Then, almost 40 years later, the 2010s TV reporters, and/or an Indonesian youth today who has never seen the original spelling of the word, realise the word as /rak.jat/. This word might have changed in the speech first, due to Betawi influence. And the letter [k] in the print version is confirming the pronunciation, smoothing the progress of change.
Some other words are more resistant to change. The examples are: tidak, bapak, kakek, and kakak. The spelling cannot support the change because the change has not yet started in the speech context. It is important to research why these words have not changed. However, the researcher assumed that it was because their synonyms in the vernacular forms are not yet changed. For instance, the word tidak and tak have all plosive glottal variants in the vernacular dialects, not limited to Betawi or other geographically close dialects around Jakarta. The synonyms include /ŋgaʔ/ and /ndaʔ/. The close phonological distance to the vernacular forms can be the factor of why the lexicon like tidak is resistant to change. Kurniawan (2018, p. 19) explained that the contact of Betawi and SI post-independence (1945) has caused the emergence of a new variety, called Jakartan Indonesia (JI) around the 1970s. The author assumed that this voiceless plosive velar /k/ coda might have made popular by the JI speakers and was penetrating the broadcasting language by the speakers.

The Language Contact Factor
Geographically, all national news broadcast companies are based in Jakarta, Indonesia. Therefore, it is highly likely the SI will receive influence from its JI dialect. In the past, or at the beginning of the broadcast in Indonesia, there was a diverse way of saying the final syllabic plosive sound /k/ and /ʔ/. As the national broadcast become more and more centralised in the Jakarta area, this variation was reduced. /ʔ/ sound is less preferred now than the /k/. Consequently, the /k/ is now considered the standard sound for most words with the final-k syllable.
Previous studies reported that one's pronunciation is determined and influenced by orthography (Bassetti & Atkinson, 2015), but some others by the background language of the speakers (Adda-Decker & Lamel, 1999). Mainly, TV news broadcasters live and grow up in the Jakarta area. As Jakartan dialect and SI reciprocally influence one another (Kurniawan, 2018), the SI speakers who are Jakartan dialect-speakers brought this Jakartan phonological quality into their broadcasting language.
Another important thing to highlight is the sound shift of /ʔ/ ~ /k/ in the Indonesian broadcasting language is evidence of the lower to the upper-class society language influence (Holmes, 2008;Labov, 2006). As discussed by Kurniawan (2018), JI has emerged from the combination of Betawi (lower) and SI (upper) contact. One of the famous examples of this lower-upper class language influence is the standard accent shift in the English language, or what is known as the Cockney influence on RP standard English (Wells 1994in Trudgill, 2008. RP English is the accent used by the royal family and was considered as the standard accent before the BBC English term is used to replace it. Instead of due to the upper-class speakers travelling to regional areas, the Indonesian plosive sound shift occurs due to the reporters' duallanguage dialects; formal and informal. The formal one is SI and the informal one is JI. Moreover, in the Indonesian context, the journey of the new variant from the lower to upper class is more complex and indirect. It started from Betawi creole, then it went to JI, and finally reaches SI. Meanwhile, in English Cockney context, Trudgill (2008) reported that the outward demographic movement from London to other areas had caused the Londoners to pick up regional phonological feature into their standard accent. This could happen because in this case, the Londoners were the minority to the regional people speaking regional dialect or accent. As the consequence, although small, the influence was spread from the lower class to the upper-class society.

CONCLUSION
The Indonesian Standard used in mass media in the last forty years has evolved phonologically. This article has provided evidence of the plosive change from glottal to velar stop sound in several Indonesian words used in TV news. In the 1980s, the use of glottal sound for words like rakyat, penduduk, untuk and letak are still common among news reporters. However, forty years later, the plosive glottal sound in these words is rarely found in a news reporting context. The sound has been replaced by the velar /k/.
The main factor that causes this sound change is the speakers' Jakartan vernacular language influence. The centralised national TV stations have caused the use of geographically close anchors who happened to speak the Jakartan dialect. The Jakartan dialect influence is brought into the standard Indonesian language displayed on TVs by the Jakartan-dialect-speaking news anchors. However, the spelling reforms that merge the symbol for both sounds might have played a supporting role, too. It is necessary to navigate future studies in languagein-media direction considering its role in shaping the language of a country, especially the phonological characteristics of the Indonesian Standard language which still receives relatively little attention both from the Indonesian and international researchers.
Moreover, the small size of the corpus used in this study might have limited the results. A study using a more extensive corpus is recommended in the future.