Abstract

Though English is increasingly becoming the lingua franca in many Southeast Asian countries, this is hardly the case in Indonesia. Bahasa Indonesia, on the other hand, has so successfully spread throughout the archipelago as a lingua franca that many of the indigenous languages have suffered or may soon suffer extinction as a result.

Even if Javanese is far from becoming extinct, the complexity and functions of the language are clearly suffering reduction as a result of the increasing use of Bahasa Indonesia. One feature of the structure of Javanese which has attracted the attention of scholars since the early days of Dutch colonization is the complex system of speech levels, clearly marking the relationship between speaker and addressee in a much more explicit and precise way than can be done in most languages. The effect of the use of Bahasa Indonesia for an increasing number of functions on the competence of the young in manipulating the speech levels will be the topic of this paper.

Standardization of the use of Bahasa Indonesia has been in progress for decades, but the process now appears to have become almost self-perpetuating, so that both standardization and self-regulation are evident.