Language attitudes towards Great Aceh and North Aceh dialects

Abstract

Acehnese people tend to have negative attitude towards speakers of Great Aceh dialect and have positive attitude to North Aceh dialect speakers. Most of people assume that Great Aceh dialect is rude, rough and crude, while North Aceh dialect is judged as refined, standard and prestigious. This study is to investigate the attitudes of speakers of Acehnese towards the Great Aceh and North Aceh dialects. The matched guise test, which has been proved as a tool to investigate people’s attitude towards particular language varieties, was used in collecting the data in this study. The data from the questionnaire of the matched guise test was analyzed in simple statistical way in order to determine the significances of the results. However, the findings of this matched guise test were not as expected. The responses from the respondents did not support certain personality traits which was strongly associated with stigmatized dialect. It was found that Acehnese speakers mostly share positive and favorable attitude towards both North Aceh and Great Aceh dialects. It indicates a stronger believe as suggested by Zulfadli (2014) that the use of this matched guise test in the study of language attitudes seems to be not suitable in Indonesia in general and Aceh in particular because of some conditions.