Rohmah's Blog

Being polite is a complicated business in any language. It is difficult to learn because it involves understanding not just the language, but also the social and cultural values of the community. We often don't appreciate just how complicated it is, because we tend to think of politeness minly as a matter of saying please and thank you in the right places. In tact, it involves a urcat deal more than the superficial politeness routines that parents explicitly that parents teach their children, as the discussion of directives and and expressives suggested.  Take the word please for example. Children are told to say please when they are making requests, as a way of expressing themselves politely. But adults use please far less than one might suppose and, when they do, it often has the effect of making a directive sound less polite and more peremptory. Compare the pairs of utterances in this example, for instance. (al) Could you take my bags up? (a2) Could you take my bags up, please. ...

Madura is my father and my mother home town and also my home town.  Madura is divided by four regencies. They are Sumenep, Pamekasan, Sampang, and Bangkalan.  Each regency has its own speech level engaged to social dialect. Firstly, Sumenep is the regency which has the most polite Madurese language and  typically has the strongest Madurese dialect. Sumenep society frequently uses Enggi/Bunten level of speech. The second regency is Pamekasan  which is the central regency of Madura. Pamekasan people usually use Enja’/Iya as their daily language even though when they are talking to their parents. Thirdly, Sampang regency has less polite language compared to the other regencies. They use Enja’/Iya for their daily communication including talking to their parents. It is suspected because they live in a maritime area. However, Sampang people use Enggi/Bunten level of speech when they are talking to the teacher or those  who are considered as the educated people. Compar...

  The Philippines is an archipelago in the Pacific with rich linguistic and cultural diversity. According to the Ethnologue, there are 171 living languages spoken in the Philippines today. For the most part, this linguistic variety has not been accurately reflected in governmental and educational policies. The current constitution declares both English and Filipino (Tagalog) to be the official languages of the country, as both are spoken in metro Manila, the nation’s capital. Making English and Tagalog the official languages of the Philippines is a practical move, seeing as there needs to be language that can be used to do business and trade as well as to communicate on both national and international levels. Still, the constitutional declaration of these two languages as official and the other languages as auxiliary takes a discriminatory tone when looking at how it resonates in other policies and in the public sphere. The linguistic discrimination is present in the educational sy...