An Overview of the Building Blocks of Casual Indonesian: udStyle Shift, Code Switch, and Code Mixud

摘要

Language variation in Indonesia provides rich resources for the building blocks of casual style of Indonesian. Among those linguistic resources are style shift, code switch, and code mix. They allow speakers, depending on their speech repertoire and the socio-pragmatic demands, to choose and use the linguistic resources of the speech community by shifting the codes within the major code, or by switching between different codes to and fro, and/or even mix up the elements of the existing codes. Based on a close scrutiny of the informal speech habits of Indonesian bilingual/multilingual speakers in an urban setting, this paper elucidates the distinction between those linguistic phenomena. Despite their distinctions, they display their unique regularities and contribution toward the most common formation of casual style of Indonesian as well as an informal in-group style of the major language in a conversation.