This study analyzes the use of Western loanwords in Evening News, Berita Malarn -seven o'clock news programs, and Duma Dalam Berita -nine o'clock news programs, broadcast by the Indonesian state-owned television, TVRI, for three months, from January to March 1996. It attempts to reveal the extent to which Western loanwords are employed in the business, crime, culture, economy, education, general, politics, science, social, sport, technology, and weather forecast registers.
The analysis of this study is textual, based on the text read by the newsreaders. Two methods are used in this study one identifying Western loanwords, the other counting their frequency rate of their occurrence. This study examines the use of loanwords in the news programs from the perspectives of linguistics, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics. The contribution of this study is directed not only to the language planning and policy but also to the teaching and learning of Indonesian and English as well as the teaching and learning of translation.
This study endeavors to propose that the government should count on the social aspects affecting language changes, its implications for several
critical issues in linguistic theory and its applications in language planning and language policy, as well as language teaching, so that the teacher should be creative in selecting and presenting the teaching materials. Linguistically, Western loanwords adopted into Indonesian result from the following factors: (a) to fill lexical gaps, (b) to provide sufficiency in semantic fields, (c) to euphemize, (d) to meet register specific purposes, (e) to display personal identity, (f) to evoke ethnocultural stereotypes, (g) to perform psychological receptivity, (h) to meet the needs of practicality and efficiency.
Sociolinguistically, Western loanwords enter Indonesian due to the symbolic association with the donor language. This symbolic association is related to social attitudes of the receptor language. In line with this, Indonesians have high receptivity towards the donor language, particularly English, since this language is considered as an international language and prestigious among the other Western languages.
Psycholinguistically, the psychological attitudes of Indonesian society towards the donor language has an important role in language borrowing. With regard to this, Weinreich (1986) affirms that the bilinguals' tolerance and intolerance to mixed languages, and their proficiency and facility of verbal expression in learned languages are relevant to this study. |