Examining language attitudes and use: A survey of Indonesian university students’ loyalty to their ethnic languages

Abstract

Currently a large number of ethnic languages worldwide are losing their vitality and popularity due to globalization and influences from dominant languages such as English and Indonesian. Such a linguistic decline is both unsettling and disheartening because in reality this loss not only means a loss of communication tools, but it also means a loss of identities and values.  Against such a backdrop, this study aims to investigate Indonesian university students' attitudes to their ethnic languages and to explore the factors that influence students' fluency in their ethnic languages.  To conduct this study, the qualitative method was used and the data were obtained using questionnaires distributed to 78 university students from 10 universities across Indonesia through Google Form. These participants were purposively selected from 18 different ethnic groups including Ambonese, Balinese, and Sundanese. The findings indicate that there are various factors affecting the participants’ fluency in their languages, namely domestic use of their ethnic languages and parental encouragement which turned out to positively affect fluency and cross-ethnic marriages and relocation of environments which negatively impacted the participants’ fluency. Therefore, this study recommends two strategies to preserve ethnic languages: (1) teaching programs for ethnic languages: schools should administer classes to support students from ethnic-language deprived backgrounds, and (2) local government policies: they are expected to issue and implement policies that encourage and protect the use of ethnic languages among younger generations.