International Journal of Indonesian Studies Volume 1, Issue 3 | Page 47

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INDONESIAN STUDIES
SPRING 2016
more friendly tone. As in (5), the speaker is trying to persuade readers to buy his or her car
and ‘ya’ could be used to make the request sound nicer.
The code-switching incidents in this study may not necessarily show that the
speakers have low competence in one of the languages. The speakers might feel more
comfortable expressing words or phrases in the chosen language. Code-switching also
occurs to help the sentence sound more casual or friendly. It might help the speakers
convey the message and show their intention better without sounding offensive.
Discourse style and the problems
The study shows that American English spelling is favoured more than British English
spelling. Three occurrences of American English spelling are found (‘favorite’, ‘realize’ and
‘favor’) while there is only one incident of British English spelling (metre). Presumably, as
from my own experience learning English since primary school, most English textbooks in
Indonesia use American English spelling. We may also refer to the textbooks used by
informal English schools such as EF English First which tend to implement American English
spelling systems. Thus, Indonesians are more familiar with American English spelling.
Furthermore, we cannot ignore the influence of Hollywood and the American music industry
in the development of the English language in Indonesia.
Since English in Indonesia is norm-dependent, most people in the country learn basic
grammatical structures from school or textbooks. The basic knowledge tends to be applied
in all contexts, which results in frequent errors. The errors have then developed some new,
acceptable norms such as in:
Missing articles
An occasional error which becomes quite common when Indonesians speak or write in
English, as reflected in this study, is that the articles are missing.
(6)

I wanna have baby.

(7)
I got red shoes, Red Hoodie, Red Iphone case from abc. I still want a red watch and
today i wore red dress for my presentation :D …
The articles, when they are actually needed before the nouns in (6) – ‘a baby’ instead of just
‘baby’ and more frequent in (7) – a red hoodie, a red iPhone case and a red dress – are
missing. It could correspond with the complexity of indefinite articles in Indonesian.
Indefinite articles differ depending on the nouns which follow. For example, for most nonliving things, the article must be ‘sebuah’ such as in ‘sebuah mobil’ (a car), ‘sebuah computer’
(a computer). ‘seorang’ is the article for humans, such as in ‘seorang polisi’ (a police officer).
‘selembar’ is followed by paper or paper-like nouns such as in ‘selembar kertas’ (a piece of
paper) or ‘selembar uang’ (a piece of paper money). Such complexity could trigger some
Indonesians to skip the indefinite articles. Thus, when using English, they assume that the
articles are not obligatory either.
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