Comparative historical dialects of sasak language

Toward codified standardized-based local language Instruction

Abstract

Language variations have always opened the debate over which variety or dialect to be chosen as a codified standardized norms within a vernacular or indigenous speech community.  Sasak is one of those ethnic group languages that is now striving to search for its standardization. This article investigates the possibility of picking up one of the five varieties of Sasak that is most likely to be adopted as the norm code of  its standardized-based-written means of the local language instruction for both elementary and junior high school students in Mataram and possibly across the island of Lombok, Indonesia. In addition to the contrastive analysis techniques used in describing the syntactic-linguistic descrepancies, this research also employed survey questionair, documents, and interviews to elicit primary data on norm of code selection. Findings reveals that the majority of the  respondents (92%) agreed toward the codification and standardization of Sasak and recommended that  either the ‘meno-mene/i’ ‘this-that’ (Pejanggik) dialect or the ‘ngeno-ngene’ (Selaparang) dialect be used as standardized norm written code for local content materials development and language instruction.  However, from the focussed group discussion, based on the contrastive and diacronic historical linguistic analysis of some morpho-syntactical structure of the three well-known dialects it was suggested that the ‘ngeno-ngene’ or the Selaparang dialect is the most probable, logical and acceptable dialect to be used.  One of the reasons is that diacronically this dialect is supposedly the origin of the other four due to the fact that much of the morphosyntactical features of those four other dialects were transformed from Selaparang variety.