Consonant Changes in Loanwords Borrowed from Indonesian into Dialects of Acehnese

Abstract

Acehnese, like other regional languages throughout Indonesia, is in constant and intense contact with the Indonesian standard language, bahasa Indonesia. Not surprisingly, a great many Indonesian loanwords are flooding into Acehnese. Some interesting sound changes have affected various aspects pf the consonants, vowels, phonotactics, and stress, and so forth. The sound changes affecting the vowels and, to a lesser extent, the consonants of Indonesian loanwords, appear in most unusual ways. This paper explores this topic in detail, drawing on data from a range of sources. We compiled a list of 285 loanwords, which we recorded when read by native speakers of each of four main Acehnese dialects. The Acehnese language consultants to this study were all either academics or postgraduate students in Aceh, and hence fluent bilingual speakers of both Acehnese and Indonesian. We compared phonemic transcriptions of these recordings with their Indonesian correspondences. This paper is the second such paper emerging from this investigation, where the first focused on the behaviour of the vowels. As such, this paper concerns the behaviour of the consonants in Indonesian loanwords migrating into Acehnese dialects. The study evidences the fact that consonant changes do not always constitute a simple case of phonological assimilation, as usually occurs in loanword phonology. Consequently, some consonant changes during the migration of loanwords expose the phenomenon of loanwords becoming an expression of Acehnese identity.