Language, Migration, and Identity: Neighborhood Talk in Indonesia

by Zane Goebel

While much scholarship has been devoted to the interplay between language, identity and social relationships, we know less about how this plays out interactionally in diverse transient settings. Based on research in Indonesia, this book examines how talk plays an important role in mediating social relations in two urban spaces where linguistic and cultural diversity is the norm and where distinctions between newcomers and old timers changes regularly. How do people who do not share expectations about how they should behave build new expectations through participating in conversation? Starting from a view of language-society dynamics as enregisterment, Zane Goebel uses interactional sociolinguistics and the ethnography of communication to explore how language is used in this contact setting to build and present identities, expectations and social relations. It will be welcomed by researchers and students working in the fields of linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, the anthropology of migration and Asian studies.

240 pages, Hardcover

First published July 29, 2010

About the author

Zane Goebel is a lecturer in Indonesian and Linguistics at La Trobe University in Australia. He has also taught these disciplines at the Northern Territory University and James Cook University. In 2001 he received his Ph.D. in sociolinguistics based on close to three years of fieldwork in Indonesia. His wife Junaeni Goebel is a native speaker of Indonesian. Zane and Junaeni are also the authors of the Pocket Indonesian Dictionary and the Essential Indonesian Phrase Book, both of which are published by Periplus Editions.