Youth Language, Gaul Sociability, and the New Indonesian Middle Class

Abstract

This article examines the linguistic form and social functions of bahasa gaul, the informal Indonesian "language of sociability," as it is used among Indonesian university students and in various publications aimed at middle‐class Indonesian youth. Bahasa gaul registers youth modernity in both its positive and more contested aspects. It expresses not only young people's aspirations for social and economic mobility, but also an increasingly cosmopolitan, national youth culture. Perhaps most significantly, bahasa gaul articulates the desire of Indonesian youth for new types of social belonging through the formulation of relationships that are more egalitarian and interactionally fluid as well as more personally expressive and psychologically individualized.

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