Summary of response percentages

4.2.3 Summary of response percentages

In short, according to the response percentages of the questionnaire, it can be said that Jambi Malay language usage in Mudung Laut and Mudung Darat was high, especially in Low domains. Its strength in the midst of surrounding languages was stronger than expected. And, attitudes towards Jambi Malay were positive, except with regard to choosing it for advancement in education or community development. In the matched guise test questions, it was found that language attitudes were less positive towards Jambi Malay than Indonesian in terms of status or position in society, and in whether a person is considered wise or not. Yet attitudes towards Jambi Malay were roughly the same or slightly more positive in terms of personal character. Overall there was little distinction between Jambi Malay and Indonesian in attitudes. In the identity question “a”, as mentioned above, more people responded positively to Jambi Malay recordings than the Indonesian recordings. In fact, this question had the widest margin of all for JM and SI. Even still, 62 of informants said “yes, this person sounds like a Jambi Malay person” for the Indonesian recordings. Although it was clear that, based on comments from the informants, the “guise” was not discovered informants did not know that it was the same person they heard speaking in two different languages, it is possible that the informants were able to detect that the speakers were native Jambi Malay speakers in even the Indonesian recordings, given subtle clues that only a fellow Jambi Malay person would notice. This could have skewed the data, if the informants believed that all the Indonesian speakers were local Jambi Malays. To address this issue, comments made by the informants as to their hypothesized origin of the speakers were examined. It was found that their comments were quite varied, and not even one hypothesis as to where a speaker was from was correct. Upstream locations and other places further away in Jambi province were mentioned, even including Kerinci, which has a language that is substantially different from Jambi Malay Prentice and Usman 1978. Points outside of Jambi Province such as Padang, Palembang, and even the nearby island of Java were frequently mentioned. On numerous occasions, for both the Jambi Malay and Indonesian recordings, informants said that the speaker was not a Jambi Malay person. 4 It is with a fair amount of confidence, then, that we can say that the informants were not biased in their answers due to the belief that all the speakers were Jambi Malays, since they often guessed that the speakers were not from Jambi at all. It would be interesting for future studies, however, to include more of a mixture of speakers i.e. some speakers from outside the area of study to see if results are any different.

4.3 Results of the structured language use observation