Language Change as a Factor in Language Maintenance: A Sociolinguistic Study of Mandar Language in Migrant Communities of South Kalimantan

Abstract

Language maintenance in migrant communities is often considered vulnerable due to pressure from dominant languages. In many sociolinguistic studies, language change is frequently viewed as an indicator of decline leading to language shift. This article offers a different perspective by positioning language change as a factor that contributes to language maintenance. The study aims to examine forms of change in the Mandar language within migrant communities in South Kalimantan (Borneo), Indonesia, and to analyze their implications for language maintenance. This research employs a qualitative approach within a sociolinguistic framework. Data were collected from spoken interactions of both older and younger generations of Mandar speakers in Baharu Utara Village, Kotabaru Regency, through observation, semi-structured interviews, and documentation. The analysis focuses on linguistic changes at the levels of phonology, morphology, and lexicon, and their relationship to the social contexts of language use. The findings indicate that Mandar has undergone phonological changes in the form of phoneme substitution and deletion, morphological changes particularly involving the use of free and bound morphemes and the integration of Indonesian affixes, as well as lexical changes through borrowing from Indonesian and Banjar. However, these changes do not diminish the social function of Mandar as a means of communication and a marker of identity within the migrant community. On the contrary, linguistic change enables Mandar to remain actively used and transmitted in a competitive multilingual environment. The study demonstrates that language change is not necessarily opposed to language maintenance, but can function as an adaptive mechanism supporting the sustainability of minority regional languages in migrant communities.