LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE AND SHIFT OF FLORES PEOPLES AS A MINORITY ETHNIC IN MALANG

The paper focuses on the processes of language maintenance and shift among the Flores community, which become minority, in Malang. Malang as the city of education has become a city of multi-culture and thus multi-language. This situation affects greatly not only in the way of world seeing but also the use of language of the peoples living there. The multilingual interactions with non-Flores peoples in many social cultural occasions and situations trigger shift in the language choice and even change. However, in fact, still, they tend to hold tightly their sense of regional primordialism as their identity. Therefore, this paper is aimed at finding out the patterns of language shift and maintenance of Flores peoples as a minority ethnic in Malang and what social cultural factors affect them. Descriptive qualitative design is used in this research with utterances of members of Flores community in Malang as its data source. The data collection is done by using several techniques: observation, recording, field note, and interview. The data obtained is analyzed based on Miles and Huberman analysis model. The result shows that there are three patterns of language shift occurred: (1) from their interaction with other East Nusa Tenggara (NTT) languages like Weejewa and Kambera, resulted the shift of accent; (2) with Bahasa Indonesia resulted the convergences of code choice: code switching and code mixing and diglossia; and (3) with Javanese resulted the shift in terms of politeness strategies used. Furthermore, the social cultural factors influencing them are: situations and conditions, ethnical background, educational degree, kinship system, and topics of discussion.

Key words: Flores ethnic, language shift, language maintenance