SYLLABLE STRUCTURES OF IDENTICAL COGNATES SHARED BY INDONESIAN AND MALAY DIALECTS

Abstract

Indonesian, the national language language of the Republic of Indonesia, is a language code derived from a standard variation of Malay, i.e Riau Malay. Meanwhile, there are many other dialects of Malay spoken in many places in the Republic of Indonesia. Bangka, Banjar, Deli, Jambi, Kerinci, Langkat, Minangkabau, and Palembang, are, at least, language codes becoming the major dialects of Malay. Since Indonesian and Malay dialects are derived from the same ancestor language, i.e. Proto-austronesian, there are cognates shared by the language codes: both the identical and the non-identical ones. This article investigates the phonological aspects of the cognates, especially the identical ones. The cognates are obtained from (1) lexical items becoming entries in dictionaries of Malay dialects above-mentioned and (2) Indonesian lexical items in Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia, i.e. the phonological forms of which are identical with the phonological forms of Malay-dialects lexical items. Therefore, the data corpora for this investigation are the phonological forms of the cognates. The phonological forms of the cognates are determined by referring to (1) the phonological forms of lexical items which are already available in the dictionaries of Malay dialects and (2) rules of grapheme-phoneme correspondences in Indonesian proposed by Hasan (2013) & Fauzi (2015). The distribution of segments (consonants, vowels, and diphthongs) and the distribution of length (as one of suprasegmental features) in the identical cognates shows patterns of syllable structures. The patterns of syllable structures show phonotactic constraints, i.e. the ones which are related to the phonotactic rules of every Malay dialects involved in this investigation.