Features of Indonesian in Bandung

This article presents features of Indonesian as spoken in Bandung, West Java. The interactions investigated are predominantly in colloquial Indonesian, but also contain features that can be attributed to Sundanese, the dominant regional language in Bandung. These include phonological features, open word class lexical items, pragmatic particles, pronouns and kinship terms, other function words, and grammatical features. Different speakers display different patterns, frequencies and interactional practices with regards to Sundanese elements that occur in their speech. Individual speakers will also vary in their use of Sundanese elements in different contexts. Rather than defining a Sundanese variety of Indonesian, these various heteroglossic practices index a sense of localised identity. This in turn suggests that the investigation of regionally inflected Indonesian might more productively focus on speakers and what they do, rather than trying to define specific language varieties.