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Using Addressing Terms to Promote World-Englishes in Indonesia

Paper · 2023 · Nurvita Wijayanti, Trie Arie Bowo and Dini Wulansari

Summary

The paper asks whether the way Indonesian English-department students address their lecturers shows English being localized, and whether this local use can count as Indonesian "ownership" of English in the World-Englishes sense. The authors take a descriptive qualitative approach. They interviewed people at eight Indonesian universities and examined chat exchanges between students and lecturers, interpreting the material through postcolonial theory and Kachru's circle model. Students routinely combine English titles such as Miss, Mam, Sir, Mister, Mr and Mrs with a lecturer's first name or nickname. This follows Indonesian norms (Bapak/Pak, Ibu plus a name) rather than native-speaker conventions. Sir in particular serves as a stand-in for Pak. The authors call this pattern fossilization, driven by mother-tongue transfer, late English learning and social habit. Lecturers accept it, since they addressed their own teachers the same way. The authors argue that such locally understood usages are a legitimate part of an Indonesian English variety. They see this as evidence that English also belongs to expanding-circle countries, not only the inner circle.

Key points

  • Data come from interviews at eight Indonesian universities plus student–lecturer chat messages, analysed qualitatively.
  • Indonesian native address terms (Bapak, Ibu, Tuan, Nyonya) and regional ones (Mas, Mbak, Abang, Kakak, Yuk) shape how English titles are used.
  • Translating Sir as Pak creates ambiguity:
    • English bare Sir is a direct address that cannot take a name, while Sir plus a full name marks a British honour.
    • Pak freely takes a name with no honorific implication.
  • Title + first name/nickname (e.g. Miss + given name) is long-standing and unremarkable to lecturers (Participant D), so it is described as fossilized interlanguage.
  • Suggested future work is Critical Discourse Analysis of address terms in other expanding-circle settings.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Bare Sir and Sir + full name are two separate constructions with different meanings (direct address vs. honorific title), so the same word needs context to resolve.
  • I2. In a localized variety, title + first name is a stable, accepted convention rather than an error. Systems trained on native-speaker norms should not treat it as noise.
  • I3. An address term carries social meaning (respect, institutional role) that may differ from its dictionary sense. Miss used for a lecturer need not signal marital status, and Sir need not signal knighthood.
  • I4. Mapping an L2 word onto the closest L1 equivalent (Sir ↔ Pak) transfers the L1 usage rules too. This is a concrete model of how cross-lingual lexical alignment can mislead.
  • I5. Address terms in chat directly identify who is being spoken to, which ties the utterance to a participant.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (tree): The parser and UD conversion could tag vocative "Sir" (UD vocative) differently from "Sir" as a flat/compound title inside a name, so later stages get the distinction for free.
  • I2 (learn): Evaluation sets could include World-English address patterns as negative controls, checking that repair rules do not "fix" Miss + given name into an unintended reading.
  • I3 (world): When building entities, honorifics could be stored as variety-dependent role/respect markers instead of hard facts like "unmarried" or "knighted", avoiding false states in the text world.
  • I4 (back): Translation through the meta-world could pick address forms by the target culture's address rules (e.g. Pak + name in Indonesian, plain "Sir" in British English), not by word-to-word lookup.
  • I5 (frames): Vocative titles like "Miss Dini" could anchor the addressee slot of a speech act and seed coreference with later "you" mentions in dialogue.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

Also on the byline: University of Bangka Belitung.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 17,450 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 17,296 worksSocial Sciences · 1,954 worksCommunication · 104 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,379 works

Cite

Cite as Nurvita Wijayanti, Trie Arie Bowo and Dini Wulansari. 2023. Using Addressing Terms to Promote World-Englishes in Indonesia. Lingua Cultura 17.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.21512/lc.v17i1.7782

@inproceedings{wijayanti2023using,
  title = {{Using Addressing Terms to Promote World-Englishes in Indonesia}},
  author = {Nurvita Wijayanti, Trie Arie Bowo and Dini Wulansari},
  booktitle = {Lingua Cultura 17},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.21512/lc.v17i1.7782},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.21512/lc.v17i1.7782}
}

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