A Corpus-Based Study on The Development Of the Javanese Language Among Multilingual Children In East Java
Abstract
This paper seeks to examine multilingual children’s Javanese across different grades of primary schools with a focus on proficiency, vocabulary, and grammatical development. The data were partially taken from CBLING (Corpus of Bilingual Learners’ Languages), a corpus developed by Universitas Negeri Malang. Using AntConc as a corpus development tool, we measured Javanese proficiency using the Mean Length of Utterances (MLU) method. Our findings on the development of Javanese proficiency and vocabulary growth indicated insignificant improvement across grades. However, the average vocabulary density grows significantly from the first two lower grades to the three higher ones. In terms of grammar, hybrid words showing morphological blendings, such as mastekno or isikno were observed in the participants’ writings. Taken together, our findings are essential for teaching and learning Javanese as a regional home language and generating an important linguistic feature of 21st century multilingual children’s Javanese.
Keywords: corpus study, Javanese language, multilingual children, East Java
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