Constructing Identity with Dialect Diversity

Abstract

The more specific language variety, called as dialect, goes beyond the means as understanding one another across utterances. This study investigates the dialect diversity as an identity construction for the speaker belonging to the East and Central parts of Lombok Island, Indonesia. Dialect, in this study, refers to the language varieties adopted by some regions in Lombok. It is indeed a general truth for some local people in Lombok; they can easily recognize where Sasak speakers belong by a dialect they use. However, the scientific study revealing this truth is hard to find. Lombok, other than its variety of famous natures, is rich in dialect diversities exist within. Therefore, the data collection was dealing with the dialogue done between the local inhabitants lived in East and Central parts of Lombok. As for the two regions involved in this study were Rumbuk, a region belongs to East part of Lombok as well as Mujur, a region belongs to Central part of Lombok. The design applied in this study was qualitative research; this study descriptively presented the data in form of words instead of numeric analysis. An interesting finding found after analyzing the data was that the dialect diversity showed the same lexical form in writing, but phonetically different. The rest number of dialect diversities was totally dealing with lexical varieties, either writing or speaking. Above all, regional dialect in Lombok can definitely be used to construct a speaker’s self-identity.