Proceedings of the 2nd English Education International Conference (EEIC) in conjunction with the 9th Annual International Conference (AIC), Universitas Syiah Kuala, September 18-19, 2019, Banda Aceh, Indonesia ISSN: 2527-8037 ACEHNESE NATIVE SPEAKER’S ATTITUDES TOWARDS THEIR MOTHER TONGUE Rachmat Wahidi* & Riadi Syah Putra Department of English Education, Faculty of Teacher Training and Education, Universitas Syiah Kuala, Banda Aceh, Indonesia *Corresponding author: [email protected] Abstract The objective of this research is to investigate Acehnese native speaker’s attitudes towards their mother tongue. This study used a case study approach in obtaining the data from an online survey, disseminated through social media and by approaching several concerned research subjects. From 18 participants’ responses, the authors concluded that the attitudes of Acehnese native speakers are still at a positive level. The results showed that a small number of factors was involved in the way the native speakers use their mother tongue. Despite the factors, 75% of respondents were willing to use Acehnese language to their children. Keywords: Acehnese, language attitude, native language, language shift. INTRODUCTION Language is the main tool for communication. Language is routinely utilized by living things to convey messages among them. The human language functions are not only used to convey messages but also has several other functions. Jacobson (1960) mentions that language functions used by humans have six functions. They are referential, poetic, emotive, conative, phatic, and metalingual function. These six functions become a unique identity for the human language system which is not found in other language systems. With this function, humans can convey their feelings, emotions, and other internal conditions to the interlocutors. In the field of sociolinguistics, language has an important role. According to Lanehart (1996), language is a code or identity for a social group. A language for a social group is the product of theirs. They have decided and determined the codes, signs, symbols, and sounds that are arbitrary, which will differ from group to group. This is aligned with Bakhtin’s (1986, pp. 67-68) notion, “Language arises from man’s need to express himself, to objectify himself… And if language also serves as a means of communication, this is a secondary function that has nothing to do with its essence,” and Freire & Macedo’s (1987, p. 128) who said that “language should never be understood as a mere tool of communication.” Acehnese is a language that is formed and used by Acehnese people (Al-Auwal, 2017). This language becomes the first language for almost all people who born and raised in Aceh. Aceh, which is the westernmost province of Sumatra, has at least 10 languages spoken by several social groups. With more than 3.5 million speakers, Acehnese language, among other languages such as Kluet, Devayan, Gayo, Haloban, etc., is the language most spoken in Aceh and becomes the identity of Aceh Province (Eberhard, Simons, & Fennig, 2019). Acehnese people come from different linguistic backgrounds. This is called a multilingual society. Most of them can communicate in two or more languages. Those who are native speakers of the Aceh language must be able to use other languages due to this factor. Native speakers of the Acehnese language intermittently tend to give up their mother tongue for several reasons. One of the factors that influence the use of language in community groups is diglossia. Diglossia is a circumstance in which a community group believes that a language is superior compared to other languages (Ferguson, 1959). In this case, their mother tongue is less popular than other languages. A number of studies have been conducted by sociolinguists shown that there is a language shift in Acehnese language usage in social groups in Aceh, e.g. Alamsyah, Taib, Azwardi and Idham (2011) and Al- Auwal (2017). Findings in Alamsyah, Taib, Azwardi, & Idham’s (2011) show that Acehnese-speaker families did not prioritize Acehnese language to their children so that the use of Acehnese language is used merely among the older generation. Moreover, Al-Auwal (2017) presents a tendency in young people in Banda 142 ACEHNESE NATIVE SPEAKER’S ATTITUDES TOWARDS THEIR MOTHER TONGUE by Rachmat Wahidi & Riadi Syah Putra Aceh to use Indonesian language rather than Acehnese in some situations. They are not comfortable using the Acehnese language for several reasons, such as the level of the popularity of the Acehnese language is low, compared to the Indonesian language, and several other reasons. In the concluding part of the article, the author shows his concern about the development of the Acehnese language in the next few generations. He said that the Acehnese language would become extinct if the youths did not persistently use Acehnese language in their environments. From those findings, the author observes that the impact of language shifts in Acehnese society begin to raise today. The author has several times found that young people tend to switch to using Indonesian when dealing with interlocutors who are the same age or younger than them. Thus, this study aims to find out factors that heavily contribute to Acehnese native speakers to use their mother tongue in the same social group and to discover Acehnese native speakers’ attitudes towards their mother tongue. In line with the background, the problems to be researched in this study are formulated into the research questions as follows. • What are factors that heavily contribute to Acehnese native speakers to use their mother tongue in the same social group? • How often the Acehnese native speakers use their mother tongue in different settings? • What is the attitude of Acehnese native speakers towards their mother tongue? LITERATURE REVIEW Language Shift and Maintenance According to Heinrich (2015), language shift assuredly involved two different languages. The is a language that is being retreated, and another language that becomes a replacement of the previous one. This phenomenon occurs because a community makes contact with a new language and that language becomes dominant, therefore the community uses the language in a vast portion. On the other hand, language maintenance denotes the situation where the language speakers tend to continue using their original language in spite of many other languages are used by the speakers when they are communicating with their group members or the same members of the community. Richards & Schmidt (2002) emphasizes that these situations (language shift and language maintenance) occur only in a bilingual or multilingual area and among language groups who speak different languages. Several studies concerned on language shift and language maintenance have been conducted by several researchers, e.g. Cavallaro (2005) and Jagodic (2011). Cavallaro (2005) studied the reasons why it is important to conserves a language, especially in Australia because of its multilingual community. Jagodic’s (2011) investigated the language maintenance and language shift among Slovenian-language users who lives in northern Italy. Language Attitudes According to Richards and Schmidt (2002), language attitudes are defined as “the attitudes which speakers of different languages or language varieties have towards each other’s languages or to their own language”. Furthermore, this attitude may have two sides of impact: positive and negative impacts on the language speakers. The attitude towards languages is also engaged by several causes, e.g. language simplicity and difficulty (that results in the language learning), language’s level of importance, stylishness, and the social status of the language’s speakers (Richards & Schmidt, 2002). An investigation conducted by Yagmur and Bayram (2015) on linguistic attitudes, use, and choice of Turkish immigrants who in the Netherlands reveals that there were two different sides of attitudes. The immigrants who have better education and higher proficiency in first and second language tend to have negative attitudes towards their native language. In contrast, less educated Turkish had more positive attitudes towards their language. Social Factors in Language Shift In terms of language attitudes, several social factors may develop language shift among social groups. This phenomenon has been studied by several sociolinguists, e.g. Abtahian, Cohn and Pepinsky (2016) and Al-Auwal (2017). Abtahian, Cohn and Pepinsky (2016) studied modeling social factors of language shift in Indonesia, involving ten local languages, e.g. Javanese, Sundanese, Batak, Acehnese, Balinese, and Gorontalo. The authors selected the languages considering the speaker population and EGIDS index. The results uncover the truth that age, gender, factors of social demographics (e.g. urbanization, education, development), ethnic group, and religion have an impact in the presence of language shift in Indonesian families. 143 Proceedings of the 2nd English Education International Conference (EEIC) in conjunction with the 9th Annual International Conference (AIC), Universitas Syiah Kuala, September 18-19, 2019, Banda Aceh, Indonesia ISSN: 2527-8037 Another study conducted by Al-Auwal (2017) disclosed several reasons causing Acehnese youths to not speaking Acehnese. Some of the factors include the language modernity, politeness, and language prestigious can influence them to use the Indonesian language in public spaces, for example, in a café, on campus, or at a coffee