An Endangered Language in a Multilingual Society: The Case of Bantik

Abstract

In Indonesia, while Indonesian, its national language, is full of vitality and immensely influential, many indigenous languages are in danger of extinction. Bantik, spoken in North Sulawesi Province, is one of such languages and serves to illustrate how languages change in various ways as their speakers diminish in number. The focus of this paper is to describe some of the significant changes the Bantik language is undergoing in response to the sociolinguistic situation in which it finds itself. After presenting the interaction of Bantik, Manado Malay, and Standard Indonesian, all of which are spoken in North Sulawesi Province, I will describe the actual performances of aged and young speakers of Bantik. In narrative speech, aged speakers, while retaining most traditional aspects of Bantik, use many Manado Malay words. In contrast to the aged speakers, who use Bantik in everyday conversations with family and friends of the same age, young speakers only have a limited knowledge of the language. They also have phonemic and morpho-syntactic rules quite distinct from those of the traditional Bantik, which strongly suggests that Bantik is undergoing attrition.