Authors: Muhammad Jawad Yuwono & Wulandari Santoso

The paper “Address Forms, Politeness, and Framing Among Multicultural Students in an Indonesian University” examines how university students from diverse cultural backgrounds in Indonesia use different address forms to express politeness and manage social relationships. The study focuses on how students address lecturers, peers, senior students, and administrative staff, and analyzes how these choices reflect sociocultural values, levels of formality, and interpersonal relationships. For the study, the researchers used questionnaires and semi-structured interviews with English Literature students at a Jakarta university.

The findings show that students employ different address forms depending on the social group they interact with. When addressing lecturers, students commonly use English honorifics such as Sir, Ma’am, and Miss, as well as Indonesian kinship terms like Pak and Bu. These forms function as negative politeness strategies that signal respect, distance, and hierarchy. In contrast, when addressing classmates, students prefer personal names, casual vocatives such as hey or eh, kinship terms like bro or kak, and even endearment terms such as beb or sayang, which reflect positive politeness and solidarity. When interacting with senior students, participants typically use upward kinship terms like Kak or Bang to express respect, while still occasionally using personal names when familiarity allows. For administrative staff, students overwhelmingly use Pak and Bu, indicating formality and respect similar to lecturer interactions, but with stronger reliance on Indonesian rather than English forms.

The study explains these patterns through three levels of interactional framing: sociocultural, genre, and interpersonal.

At the sociocultural level, factors such as gender, age, marital status, ethnicity, and linguistic identity influence address choices. At the genre level, the degree of formality affects address forms. English honorifics are commonly used in classroom lectures where English is the language of instruction, whereas Indonesian forms dominate other formal settings such as administrative interactions. Informal contexts among students encourage the use of nicknames, personal names, and endearment terms. At the interpersonal level, familiarity and closeness shape address choices; students tend to use more informal or affectionate terms with friends and known seniors, while maintaining formal address terms for unfamiliar individuals or those with greater authority.

Overall, the study concludes that address forms among multicultural Indonesian university students reflect complex interactions between politeness strategies and social factors across multiple contexts. Although the findings are preliminary due to the limited sample size, the study still provides insight into intercultural communication and the evolving use of English and Indonesian address forms in higher education settings.

 

The full paper can be found here: https://aclanthology.org/2024.paclic-1.106.pdf

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