Intonation of the Yogyakarta palace language

Abstract

"Not much prosodic research has been done on the languages of Indonesia in general. Indonesian prosody was researched by Pané (1950), Halim (1969), Samsuri (1971), Laksman (1991, 1994), Odé (1994), van Zanten (1994) and Ebing (1997); regional languages of the Raja Ampat islands were researched by Remijsen (2002, this volume), Kutai Malay by Sugiyono (2003, this volume) and Manado Malay by Stoel (2005, this volume). Javanese is another regional language of Indonesia; it is very widely spoken and thus an important object of research. In view of the vastness of the topic, I will restrict my research to the variety of Javanese which is used in the palace of Yogyakarta. The Yogyakarta palace still has a clear social function and it is the cultural centre of the entire Yogyakarta area. The official palace language is called basa bagongan. The aim of the present chapter is to describe the intonation patterns of statements, questions and commands in this variety of the Javanese language"