DELETIONS OF INDONESIAN SEGMENTS IN MALAY DIALECTS

Abstrak

Deletions, as a type of morphophonemic phenomena, are often found in the phonological forms of the cognates which are shared by the languages or by the dialects which are derived from the same ancestor language. The phenomena are also found in the cognates which are shared by the dialects of Malay in Indonesia when they are compared to their equivalents in Indonesian language. This article analyzes the patterns of the deletions of Indonesian segments found in the cognates. The synchronic comparative analysis is based on the facts that (1) Indonesian is derived from the standard variation of Malay, i.e. Johor-Riau Malay and (2) it has become the national language – as well as the official language – of the Republic of Indonesia, i.e. a country where the dialects mentioned above are spoken. The corpus of the data was selected from the cognates recapitulated in a recent study on morphophonemics, i.e. the one which was conducted by Syamsuar & Priyoto (2025). The morphophonemic phenomena, including deletions, were found in the phonological forms of the cognates shared by Indonesian and thirty-four dialects of Malay in Indonesia. The phonological forms of the cognates, which are needed for the analysis, are provided in the corpus. The deleted segments in the cognates which are then analyzed in this article comprise consonants, vowels, and segment-clusters. In addition, the occurrence of length – as one of the prosody or suprasegmental features – which is related to or associated with certain segment deletions, is also involved in the analysis. The analysis of the deletions is based on the syllabification of the cognates. In other words, the syllable-structure-based occurrences of the segments are brought into account in the analysis. The distribution of the recapitulations of the deletions shows some patterns. The findings show the dominations of certain patterns of deletions. In conclusion, the deletions comprise aphaeresis, syncope, apocope, haplology, and word-shortening