Discursive valuing practices at the periphery: Javanese use on Indonesian youth radio in multilingual Solo

1 Introduction

Many studies have captured the different ways of valuing Javanese language in Indonesia. Some have focused on how younger and older generations within the Javanese community evaluate different ways of using Javanese (Errington 1985, 1988; Handoko 2007; Siegel 1986; Smith-Hefner 2009). Others have explored valuing practices as part of their focus on: how speakers choose one language instead of another (Kartomihardjo 1981; Smith-Hefner 2009; Wolff and Poedjosoedarmo 1982); national language policies and their manifestation in schooling systems (Tamtomo 2019; Zentz 2015, 2017); language socialisation practices within the family (Kuntjara 2001; Smith-Hefner 1988); talk among internal migrants (Goebel 2010); and languages in the Indonesian media (Goebel 2015; Manns 2014, 2011).

As we might expect from contact settings more generally (Goebel 2019), these studies indicate that contact between speakers with different experiences, and thus communicative resources, result in different values being assigned to the different fragments of language used during contact. Such valuing practices are also impacted by ongoing changes in language regimes. In the case of Indonesia, the period between roughly 1965 and 1998 can be thought of as one where Indonesian was highly valued by the state and was part of the nation-building apparatus (Errington 2000; Sneddon 2003). Local languages were constitutionally recognized during this period and even taught in some schools in Indonesia (Kurniasih 2007; Mertosono 2014), but more often than not, local languages were marginalised (e.g. Kuipers 1998). Errington (2000) pointed out that the different assignment of value to the national language and local languages within Indonesian emerged through two processes of authorization; (1) formal institutionalization by the nation-state and (2) sociocultural norms of exemplariness formed in and through daily language use and commentaries about such use, as in the case of Javanese used by an ethnic-elite.

However, after regime change in 1998, the social value of local languages began to increase (Goebel 2015; Goebel et al. 2017, 2020). In this paper, we are particularly interested in one case of this broader trend of the increasing social value of local languages in the media by focusing on how languages are discursively identified and valued in the youth radio in the periphery. In doing so, we examine instances of interaction on the daily program, Waktu Indonesia bagian Sambat, to see how Indonesian and Javanese are valued and identified.

To demonstrate these valuing practices, in the following section, we synthesize work that invites us to examine how values are produced through situated comments about the appropriateness of bits of language in a particular setting (Agha 2007), how these values are circulated and stabilized through a centre-periphery approach (Pietikäinen et al. 2016), and how values are reflected through the different use of linguistic features to create different participation frameworks (Goffman 1981). We follow this by introducing our data and methods of analysis. In our analysis of this material, we find that the ideas of Jakarta-centrism, language labels, and how expectations about what should occur within a segment of radio talk are linked with the value of sets of linguistics features. We conclude by highlighting the changing social value of linguistic features as part of current patterns of social change in Indonesia. The conclusion emphasizes the importance of a centre-periphery perspective in illustrating an empirical change in the social value of linguistic features in media discourses.

2 Language valuing practices

In this section, we synthesize scholarship that speaks to how ideas, such as language(s), boundaries, and identities are valued in social life. We argue that the way participants use and alternate their linguistic features during an interaction is bound to the norms of use applied in a wider institutional, societal, and cultural domain (e.g. Agha 2007; Blommaert 2010; Wortham 2005). We start by examining language valuing practices in face-to-face interactions through the notion of participation framework (Goffman 1981) and move to its relation to the cultural scheme of value production (Agha 2007) and value circulation through a centre-periphery approach (Pietikäinen et al. 2016).

Blommaert (2010, 2018, 2020 argues that the social value of a language is often determined by the function it serves within a society. Examining situated language use, thus, helps us understand how a language is discursively valued. Goffman (1981) introduced the notion of “participation framework” to approach language use by observing the norms of language use applied within situated social practices involving specific participants. In this case, the way participants use linguistic features is bound to the role they perform when producing an utterance, the situational context, and specific institutionalized expectations (Goffman 1981: 138). For example, in a radio interaction, a broadcaster often serves three different roles; as an animator when they read a prepared text, a principal when they serve an institutionalized social role, and an author when they produce the words based on their personal sentiments.

These roles reflect their sentiment, whether they represent themselves or others (Goffman 1981: 146). This sentiment is often observable through how a speaker uses personal deixis to create agency, such as “I” or “we”, or how they report others’ talk and inhabit a particular social persona through the appropriation of another groups’ accent or dialect. This sentiment is what Goffman (1981: 10) refers to as “production format”. Goffman (1981: 10) noted that production format is confirmed by the ratified hearers of the utterance. Their responses determine whether or not the speakers’ intent is understood while pointing to the norms applied within that situation. In addition, a set of linguistic features used in participants’ moment-by-moment interaction must be seen as “emergent” based on its entanglement with wider institutional and societal contexts (Agha 2007; Goodwin 2000). To understand the value of linguistic features within interactions, thus, require us to consider larger social processes of value production.

Through Agha’s (2007) notion of the cultural scheme of value production, the social value of a set of linguistic features used in an interaction is bound to (1) the social domain, (2) the social range, (3) the situated negation of appropriateness, which Agha referred to as “the threshold of normativity”, and (4) the mechanisms of institutionalization and authority (Agha 2007: 283). People who are exposed to the same idea about what is appropriate belong to the same social domain. This social domain can be widened when the number of people who have been exposed to the same ideas about appropriateness grows based on participation and shared space and time, giving them a mutual understanding of the value of a semiotic form or sign, including linguistic features.

People’s awareness of value determines the threshold of normativities applied in one social domain. The three thresholds of normativity (Agha 2007: 124–126) are; “a norm of behaviour” as a highly recognizable “default” condition assigned to a specific social category, such as ethnic and racial stereotypes; “a normalized model of behaviour” as patterns of behaviour that are reflexively understood as “normal” by a group of people in a specific social domain; and “a normative standard” as the “normal” behaviour which is standardized by social actors, such as a nation-state government or other powerful institutions in a specific social domain.

This threshold of normativities establishes how sets of behaviours are valued in a social domain, from normative to non-normative. Agha (2007: 169) referred to this range of categorical values as “social range”. The social range of a language is established through a set of categorical values that can differentiate features of language while discursively naming them. The set of linguistic features that is considered normative is often enforced to be “the standard” through, what Agha (2007: 283) referred as, the institutionalization process. Echoing this idea, Heller (2006: 9) argued that the value of a language is often institutionalized through political institutions (such as parliments) and cultural institutions (such as the school and media). While Heller (2006) categorized the state as a political institution and school and media as cultural institution, Zentz (2015, 2017 and Goebel (2015) illustrated how school and media are often regulated by a nation-state’s policies.

Errington (2000: 215) argues that the institutionalization of language value must be approached through the lens of standardization and exemplariness. While standardization is often done by powerful agents such as government policies, exemplariness is often done discursively through the act of commenting on and labelling based on sociocultural norms applied in a specific social domain. This discursive process of valuing also includes the way linguistic features are used and commented on within an interaction, such as labelling, defining, and negotiating a term’s meaning and the appropriateness of the linguistic features being used, and the idea of personhood associated with the language users. This different range of values are often used by speakers as a resource for identity work.

In recent contemporary sociolinguistic studies, this type of identity work is often approached through the lens of centre–periphery (Blommaert et al. 2005; Dovchin 2018; Goebel 2020; Pietikäinen et al. 2016; Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes 2013). This approach sees the emergence and circulation of the social values of linguistic features as a result of a centre–periphery relationship. The concepts of “standard,” “normative,” and “exemplary” are frequently used to define and construct centrality, whereas “deviation” or “variant” are frequently associated with the periphery. People in the periphery frequently imitate, to some extent, the linguistic and non-linguistic features associated with a centre as a form of identity work (Agha 2007; Goebel 2020). While imitation is based on the dominant ideological interests in the centre, within the process, the linguistic and non-linguistic features from the centre are often recontextualized based on emerging appropriateness in the periphery (Blommaert et al. 2005; Pietikäinen et al. 2016). This emerging appropriateness is what Agha’s (2007: 125) referred as “a normalized model of behaviour”.

The recontextualization of linguistic features as part of identity work is illustrated by Woolard’s (1998], [2004], [2008) notion of bivalency. Woolard (1998, 2004, 2008 argued that bivalent forms are used by a speaker to perform more than one social identity in an interaction. Instead of imitating a whole chunk of a language unit, a bivalent form emerges through combinations of linguistic features (such as syntax, morphology, lexicon, phonology, and orthography) from two different linguistic systems into a single linguistic unit. For example, Zentz (2020) illustrates how the use of Indonesian linguistic features with Javanese phonological features are often associated with a peripheral identity.

Our discussion of valuing practices has so far pointed out the process in which the social value of language emerges and circulates through interaction. This includes how language is habitually used and considered “normal” by specific groups of people engaged in situated social practices (Goffman 1981). The norms applied within this situated interaction are bound to the norms applied in a wider social domain which determine the value of linguistic features in use (Agha 2007). Thus, attention to commentaries and observations needs to be complemented with broader understanding of how different sets of linguistic features are valued in wider participation frameworks – e.g. media, schools, and language policies. This connection highlights the importance of paying attention to the authorization and institutionalization processes of value production (Agha 2007) and the relationships between centres and peripheries (Blommaert et al. 2005; Pietikäinen et al. 2016) to gain an understanding of how values are circulated and transformed in different social domains.

3 Methodology and the local radio ecology

Solo Radio is a private radio in Solo City, Central Java that focuses on the youth segment of the market. The statistical data gained from the radio staff in January 2021 shows that the radio competes with at least nine other radio stations in the city. The data from Jogjastreamers website rating and the Nielsen radio rating collected by the radio staff in January 2021 indicate Solo Radio as the most popular radio in the city, as shown in the following figure.

Based on the types of information and radio branding, the nine radio stations in Figure 1 can be categorized into five different types: youth radio (Solo Radio, PTPN, Metta FM), family radio (Ria FM), news-based radio (Solopos FM), edutainment (Dista FM, Radik) and religious radio (RDS and Immanuel). These categorizations are based on how the radio label their stations on their websites, social media official accounts, and in their programs. From this categorization, we can see that Solo Radio, PTPN, Immanuel, and Metta FM are the most popular. Three out of the four are youth radio. This shows that youth radio is popular among people in Solo.

Figure 1:

Radio streaming audiences via Jogjastreamers January 2021.

Despite being aired in Javanese speaking areas, all of these radios are delivered in Indonesian. The data collected from Solo Radio’s internal meeting in January 2021 shows the distribution of Solo Radio’s audience (Figure 2).

Figure 2:

Solo radio audiences’ location per January 2021.

The statistics indicate that 48 % of the audience is from Surakarta, another name for Solo City. The remaining audiences are from other Javanese-speaking areas in Central Java; Boyolali, Sukoharjo, and Klaten. Only 3.7 % of the audience is from Jakarta, while the remaining 33.1 % are from a number of different areas. The difference in the language used by the radio and the language used by the audience of the radio points to two different normativities existing within the radio station; normativities formed through institutional imaginaries of standard broadcasting language and normativities formed in and through everyday conversations in Solo, Central Java. These contested normativities will be the point of departure for discussing practices of valuing different languages in radio programming in this station.

In May 2021, Solo Radio launched its first-ever Javanese program. Based on their consistent use of Bahasa Indonesia in all of their programs, this Javanese program can thus be considered a site where contestation of normativities took place – normativity created and standardized by the radio and normativities among the audience. This radio program aired from Monday to Friday from 1 to 4 pm. The title of the program, Waktu Indonesia bagian Sambat, is the combination of Indonesian words Waktu Indonesia bagian, referring to the concept of Indonesian Time zone, and Javanese word sambat ‘complaining’. The English gloss for the show is “Indonesian time to complain”.

The concept of Sambat, is considered as the highlight of the show. The format of the show involves participation from the audience. The audience is invited to send their sambatan ‘complaint’ about any topic related to personal life, their job, social relations, their surroundings, and their current situation. The program gained positive uptake from the audience as indicated by the number of advertisements, and audience engagement which were double that of other programs at Solo Radio, and an award from the Jogjastreamer streaming platform for being the most streamed radio program in May 2020.

A total of 120 h of media content were recorded in the period between June 2020 and July 2020. Following the theoretical insights previously discussed, the recording and interview data will be analysed by applying Agha’s (2007) cultural scheme of value production to centre–periphery relations (Pietikäinen et al. 2016), and participation frameworks (Goffman 1981). To sum up, our analysis focuses on four elements: 1) The normative standard of language delivery in the radio station, 2) centre-periphery discourses about this practice, 3) the sets of linguistic features used by the announcers and audiences within the program (i.e. production format); and 4) the normativities that emerge from these discursive interactions (typically this manifests itself through evaluation of language features and social personas).

In terms of determining whether a language was Javanese, Indonesian, or both, we initially drew upon our backgrounds and the act of labelling and commenting done by the radio staff in interviews and within the interactions that occured during the program. Author 1 was born and raised in Solo within a Javanese-speaking family, while Author 2 has been learning both Indonesian and Javanese since the early 1990s when he first conducted long-term fieldwork in Central Java. This was supplemented with the commenting and labelling of language by the announcers during the program.

4 The circulation and stabilization of values in the Indonesian media

Indonesia is constitutionally and in practice a multilingual society. This section briefly examines this multilingualism and how it is institutionalized and circulated. Most Indonesians speak two languages, including one of a few hundred local languages, and after twelve years of schooling, Bahasa Indonesia, the national language (Sneddon 2003). Local languages and Indonesian, thus, have social value of sorts, although this is in constant flux and varies according to user (Goebel et al. 2020). We can say that the social value of the languages is institutionalized, mainly, through the nation-state’s history and development (Errington 1988, 1998, 2022; Goebel 2020; Goebel et al. 2016; Sneddon 2003) and media products (Goebel 2015; Smith-Hefner 2007).

After Indonesia’s independence in 1945, Bahasa Indonesia gained its official status as the national language under the state’s constitution. Under Indonesia’s first president, Soekarno, Bahasa Indonesia was valued as the language of unity to legitimate the new nation (Errington 1998, 2000, 2022; Goebel 2018, 2020). When Soekarno was replaced by Suharto, national development became the main theme of the government programs. During Suharto era (also known as “New Order”), from 1967 until 1998, the value of Bahasa Indonesia slowly shifted along with the national development program. The language was valued as the language of the development (Errington 1998, 2000). Suharto encouraged the use of Indonesian as part of the infrastructure of national development as marked by the standardization of Bahasa Indonesia.

Along with the development of Indonesian as the national language, the fear of language loss also became a theme of the government’s language program, which prompted the revitalization and preservation programs for local languages (Errington 1998; Sneddon 2003). This initiative positioned the national language as the language of development while locating local languages as languages that require preservation. This implies that Indonesian is valued as the language of the future while local languages are valued as the languages of the past (Zentz 2015, 2017).

The unequal valuing of the national language and local languages were also implemented by the nation-state government through media regulation (Errington 2000; Goebel 2010, 2015; Ida 2006; Sneddon 2003). For example, Article 39 in the 1945 version of the consitution states that Indonesian must be used as the language of the mass media, although local and foreign languages are also allowed. During this era, Indonesian was dominantly used in national television and radio, while local languages were very limited. TVRI, as a government-owned television station, was the model of exemplary formal standard Indonesian (Goebel 2015; Sneddon 2003).

Toward the end of Suharto’s era, private Indonesian media such as MTV, circulated Indonesian features that imitated the talk of Jakartan “cool kids”, which was later known as Bahasa Gaul (Manns 2011; Smith-Hefner 2009). The type of language delivery introduced by MTV has become a model for other youth media nationwide, in both television and radio (Smith-Hefner 2009). The case of Gaul illustrates how emerging sets of Indonesian features used among youth in the capital city are circulated nationwide by the media to construct an identity of being “young and modern”. Jakartan-Indonesia is often considered to be the Indonesian used by people in Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia because powerful, wealthy, educated and ‘modern’ people live in Jakarta (Anderson 1966; Errington 1988; Sneddon 2003). The national imaginaries of Jakartan-Indonesia and the institutionalisation of Bahasa Indonesia through nation-state policy position Jakarta as “the centre” of media language speakership.

This centrality creates a hierarchical relationship between the national language and local languages in the media (Errington 2022; Goebel et al. 2020). While the use of Indonesian features is often associated with the idea of disseminating national identity and modernity (Jurriëns 2007, 2009, 2011), the use of local languages is often associated with the idea of “traditional” pointing to a poor, uneducated, and undesirable peripheral persona (Goebel 2015; Manns 2011, 2014). Despite this negative valuing, the use of local languages in the media is still positively associated with intimate social relations (Lindsay 1997; Suryadi 2005). However, the negative representation of local languages in the national media shifted after the New Order. This was indicated through the habitual use of local language features in Indonesia television (Goebel 2015: 234).

In his studies, Manns (2011, 2014 observes this dynamic relation of national and local languages in local media by focusing on the way features are valued in youth radio in Malang, East Java. While the older studies of Javanese language differentiate sets of Javanese features into three different types (Krama, Madya and Ngoko) (Berman 1998; Errington 1988; Kartomihardjo 1981; Poedjosoedarmo 1982; Siegel 1986; Wolff and Poedjosoedarmo 1982), Manns’ (2011) study points to the valuing of only two types of Javanese (Krama and Ngoko). The everyday language, Ngoko, is linked to intimacy, whereas Krama is linked to formality and royal identity. The study revealed the value of Javanese phonological features when speaking Indonesian labelled as medok. This phonological feature is characterized by vowel shift and pre-nasalisation, and the way ‘d’ or a ‘t’ falls between two vowels is pronounced with the tongue further back in the mouth (Manns 2011, 2014; Smith-Hefner 2007). At the morphological level, it is shown by the use of /ʔ/ in a morpheme ending with vowel /a/, replacement of /a/ by /e/, and dropping an initial /h/ (Kartomihardjo 1981: 55–61).

Interviews with radio staff in the study show that Jakartan features, such as pronouns and English, are valued as inappropriate and inauthentic representations of how the announcer would normally speak (Manns 2014). While his audiences agreed with the inappropriateness of the use of Jakartan pronouns (Manns 2014), in general, his audiences had more mixed ideologies. Where the use of Javanese features was concerned, all seemed to point out that using a Javanese medok accent to speak Indonesian was not acceptable for its association with undesirable peripheral personas, while using some Javanese words with Indonesian (language alternation) was okay (Manns 2014: 54–53).

Despite focusing on the ideologies of language use in the production and reception processes of youth media, except for a broader description of different varieties of Indonesian, Manns’ (2011, 2014 studies exclude the observation of actual language usage in the radio programs. This becomes another point of engagement for the present study, which seeks to examine the product of such ideologies as they are discursively evaluated in-situ at Solo Radio.

5 The modelling of youth radio language in the periphery

In this section, we focus on value production (Agha 2007) at the radio station by analysing the language modelling of youth radio in the periphery. Based on a “participation framework” (Goffman 1981) analysis of the radio program, we illustrate how the habitual use of different sets of linguistic features form normative standards for the linguistic conduct of youth radio in Solo. Further, we compare the participation framework with Jakartan youth radio programming. Through this centre–periphery approach (Pietikäinen et al. 2016), we observe how the centre-periphery relation of the radio and Jakartan media produce a range of values that form the radio’s normative standard of linguistic conduct. We argue that Jakartan youth television program is an authoritative model of normativity for youth radio in the periphery.

The following example is taken from an opening segment of Waktu Indonesia bagian Sambat. This opening segment is a model of linguistic features that are habitually used in all other programs in the radio station. The duration of all of the programs on the radio is 3 hours. Each hour of each program is divided into four quadrants, the duration of each quadrant is 15 min. In each quadrant, the segments are divided into; opening/re-opening of the program (1 min), the talk segment (informative content/audience participation) (4 min), and songs (10 min). In the extract, plain font is used to indicate Javanese, underlined font is used for Indonesian, and small caps are used for English. Words that are not expressed in the original transcript but “understood” in the translation are written in square parentheses [ ]. Performative bits are surrounded by quotation marks (i.e. “utterance”).

In the extract, we can see that in the opening of the segment, the announcer re-opens the segment by introducing the song title with the English word “with” (line 2), addressing the audience as ‘Sololovers’ (line 1), and re-introduced themselves ‘still with us’ (line 6). Besides using the English ‘Sololovers’, the word ‘guys’ (line 10) is commonly used by the announcers to address their audience. Based on usage found in other programs on this radio, the announcers also often use this type of introduction along with the radio frequency and a tagline in English. In doing so, the announcer starts in by using expressions such as:

1. “[the name of the singer] with [the title of the song]”,

2. “the song coming from [singer name]”, or

3. “that was [singer name] with [song title]”

These English expressions are a sort of template for introducing songs within a re-opening segment of all of the programs in Solo Radio.

In the extract, we can also see the English word “yeah!” (line 9) and English organizational marker “so” (line 10). The announcers also habitually use different organizational English words such as “next”, “now”, and “by the way” to mark the changing of a segment from a re-opening segment to a talk segment. While having the same ratified listeners (i.e., the radio audience), the announcer plays two different roles within the two segments. Within the opening segment, the announcer plays both animator and principal roles. They announce the radio tagline, the radio frequency, the name of the program, and the song they just played, while demonstrating their authority to start and end the show. In this case, the utterances they make are representations of the institution of the radio station, rather than their own sentiments. The utterances are templates used in every program by every announcer at the radio station. In contrast, in the talk segment, the roles of the announcer are those of an animator and author. The utterances in this segment are often personal. As animator-author, they express their own sentiments when delivering the news or interacting with the audience, as illustrated in line 10–13. This is where the announcer changes their tone from an authoritative tone in opening the program to a conversational one when talking with the audience in the talk segment.

In the program, the changing segment is always marked with the changing language features which are signaled by the use of Indonesian with a Javanese accent. This set of linguistic features is only used in the Javanese program and not in any other programs on the radio. Following Woolard (1998), Woolard and Genovese (2007), we will refer to this set of linguistic features as “bivalent Javanese Indonesian” (to be discussed in the following section). While the linguistic features used for the talk segment in the program are different from other programs, the use of Jakartan-Indonesian with occasional English is similar to all the programs on the radio. The utterances in the opening segment are therefore the standard of institutionalized linguistic conduct at this radio station.

Based on this standard, the use of linguistic features in these segments indicate the way languages are valued at the institutional level. For example, English is frequently used for introduction and organizational talk when the announcers play the role of animator-principal but have never been used in the talk segment when they play animator-author. This means that Jakartan-Indonesian along with English is valued as professional language (as we will see in Section 6), as the standard normative conduct of the radio station. This model of using English and Jakartan-Indonesian mixture for introductions is like that on youth Jakartan radio and music stations popularized by MTV (Smith-Hefner 2007: 190). We illustrate the similarity through an extract taken from an opening segment of one of MTV’s shows, called MTV Getaran Cinta, which aired from the early 2000s until 2010.

The resemblance between the opening segment in the Solo Radio programs and the MTV program points to the imitation of linguistic patterns and broadcasting conduct. The imitation positions MTV as an authoritative model which creates a category of youth through the use of Jakartan-Indonesian and English features. This imitation also reproduces an association between youth modernity and Jakarta-centrism. In examing how specific linguistic features, broadcasting arrangements, and territory (a Jakartan TV station) are associated with the social category of “youth” we see how the use of English linguistic features in Solo Radio’s broadcasts are valued over other languages and how these features become the “normal” language of youth media.

As discussed in Section 2, here, linguistic features associated with “central” (Jakarta) become resources for identity work which are imitated by people in the periphery (Solo) forming stereotypes on a larger socio-historical scale. While the use of English represents youth, this organizational talk delivered in English also points to other historical associations with Jakartan youth, namely a Gaul identity (e.g., Manns (2011, 2014 and Smith-Hefner (2007). In sum, the use of English in the introduction and in organizational talk points to a Jakarta-centric youth media and Jakartan youth identity.

By using this authoritative model as a broadcasting standard, the station also imagines its audience (as the ratified hearer of the talk) as an Indonesian-speaking youth. This further influences their language design in other segments, especially those that value a combination of English and Jakartan-Indonesian as part of the professional standards of broadcasting. English and Jakartan-Indonesian, thus, must be exemplified by the announcers at Solo Radio. This authoritative model of Jakartan-Indonesian use leads to unequal valuing which points to a centre–periphery (Pietikäinen et al. 2016) relationship on a larger socio-historical scale. This points to the way the radio station uses these set of linguistic features from the centre to model a young and modern image for their audience in the periphery.

This practice supports the argument that the use of Jakartan-Indonesian features does not reflect the language of the “actual” audience in Solo but, rather, is a representation of the station’s perception of how youth radio should sound. Although Jakartan-Indonesian is the normative standard on the radio, most people in Solo speak Javanese. This then leads to an unequal valuing of Jakartan-Indonesian and Javanese within the radio station because both languages exist in that social domain. Referring to Agha (2007), Solo Radio has become an authoritative figure from the periphery – a social actor that circulates the association of linguistic features and their stereotypical value into a wider social domain. In this case, Solo Radio circulates and stabilizes the language of Jakartan youth in the centre (Jakarta) to the youth in the periphery (Solo) through their style of language delivery. After further discussing institutionalization processes, in the next sections, we continue to discuss how this type of language delivery is challenged and changed in Solo Radio’s first Javanese radio program, Waktu Indonesia bagian Sambat.

6 Emerging normativities in the Javanese radio program

Building on the normative standard of linguistic conduct of the radio station, in this section we focus on the valuing of linguistic features in their first Javanese radio program, Waktu Indonesia bagian Sambat. In doing so, we analyse the emerging norms of broadcasting conduct at Solo Radio by examining the different sets of linguistic features and the commentaries following their use in different segments of the program. Our analysis shows how different languages are valued in the program and illustrates the way the institutional normative standard of linguistic conduct is challenged and changed.

We found that the participation frameworks of the radio program are formed based on the program segments, speaker–hearer relations, and set of linguistic features in use. These all set the tone of interaction and the personas constructed through the interaction. The constellations of linguistic and non-linguistic features within these participation frameworks become sites where the value of languages is formed and point to what normativity is applied.

In Table 1, we can see that the participation framework changes between opening/re-opening, advertisements, talk segments, and the audience participation segment. The change indicates the type of normativity applied within each segment. When the announcers act as principle and represent the institutional sentiment, such as in opening/re-opening and advertisements, fewer Javanese features appear in the utterances. These segments are scripted. When they act as author, which involve more personal sentiment, more Javanese features are used. This appearance of Javanese features can be considered part of a social range of valued linguistic features: Jakartan-Indonesian for very scripted and professional interaction, Indonesian with a Javanese accent for scripted but more spontaneous interaction, and Javanese for a closer relationship, such as the interaction between the announcers.

As we discussed in Section 5, the use of Jakartan-Indonesian are modelled based on the normative standard of linguistic conduct institutionalized by Jakartan media. The set of Javanese features, in contrast, set an interpersonal tone following a normativity applied among Javanese youth. While the participation framework in opening/re-openings and advertisements are the same as that used in other programs, the observation of the talk segment of Waktu Indonesia bagian sambat revealed the emergence of a new set of linguistic features and norms for their use. The two emerging normativities are; the changing value of Jakartan-Indonesian and the normalization of Javanese linguistic features. We will first elaborate on the changing value of the “normative” Jakartan-Indonesian and then move to the emerging features of Javanese features and bivalent Javanese Indonesian features.

7 Conclusion

Taking inspiration from theoretical developments of how ideas, such as language(s), boundaries, and identities are valued in social life (Agha 2007), this paper has illustrated how a case of change – not just in linguistic features, but in their social value in media texts – is approached through a centre-periphery perspective (Pietikäinen et al. 2016) and participatory framework analysis (Goffman 1981).

The analysis of the program’s participation framework has shown that a set of Jakartan-Indonesian features along with English are imitated and valued as the standard language of broadcasting of youth radio in the periphery because of its association with the Jakartan youth. This institutional valuing has illustrated that such sign imitation discursively positioned Jakarta as the centre of youth culture and modernity. This contrasts with the language of the radio’s audience, the Javanese-speaking youth. However, in their first Javanese language program, a new normativity emerged in the station which resonated with normativities found among Javanese-speaking youth. The emerging normativity is indexed by the two emerging linguistic sets used within the talk segment of the radio program. The two sets are Javanese linguistic features to talk among announcers and bivalent Javanese-Indonesian between announcers and audience.

This finding contrasts to previous findings from Kartomihardjo (1981) and Wolff and Poedjosoedarmo (1982), which show that speaking Indonesian with a Javanese accent is negatively valued for its association with low-class and uneducated people. In contemporary Central Java, bivalent forms have become acceptable as a way to accommodate a professional identity as an announcer while still being relatable to the Javanese-speaking youth audience. This finding also contrasts with previous findings from Manns (2011, 2014 and Lindsay (1997). While their studies showed that local languages and their features are negatively valued in the local media, this paper has shown otherwise. By accommodating the normativity applied among Javanese youth, the program received positive feedback from its audience. While pursuing sameness in the types of normativity found among Javanese youth on the reception end, the program did not completely abandon the institutional norms and its association with Jakartan broadcasting standard. The new normativity in the program emerged as a result of the multiple centres of normativities in media domains of the periphery. This then influenced the existence of two social personas alternately inhabited by both announcers, which further governed the production and alternation of linguistic features within the program.

By applying a centre-periphery perspective (Blommaert et al. 2005; Pietikäinen et al. 2016) to the evaluation of languages in multilingual Indonesia, we can see that the valuing of local and national languages within a broadcaster in the periphery are influenced by two centres of normativities; institutional and socio-cultural. In this case, institutional normativity is formed through the imitation of the media in the centre because of its association with youth and modernity. Sociocultural normativity is formed in and through everyday conversations in Solo, Central Java because of it was relatable for Javanese youth.

More generally and for those interested in change in Indonesia, the paper provides a micro view of larger phenomena, namely the valuing of different languages – national and local – and how valuing practices are specific to topics, people, times and social conduct. The paper has highlighted the importance of focusing on value production, circulation, and institutionalization (Agha 2007) for analysing emerging normativity. While the notion of participation framework (Goffman 1981) helped with analysing valuing practice based on situational use of language, the normativities in other social domains, such as the nation-state, organizations, and media, must be part of explanations of practice.