ABSTRACT
Person referring terms are an important linguistic resource and are often the site of social action and stancetaking in conversational interaction. Speakers of Indonesian can access a range of pronouns, kinship terms and names for referring to self and other. In this chapter I examine first- and second-person reference among young Indonesian speakers in the city of Bandung, a city with a vibrant youth culture, a strong cultural identity as the dominant city of the Sundanese ethno-linguistic region, and a city also strongly influenced by the socio-cultural trends of the nearby Indonesian capital, Jakarta. The young Indonesian speakers in this study use pronouns and other forms of person reference associated with standard Indonesian, colloquial Jakartan Indonesian and Sundanese. By examining data from focus groups about identity and language usage together with transcripts of naturally occurring conversation, I show how young people’s choice of person reference indexes locality for purposes of immediate social action in the context of Indonesia’s complex social and physical landscape.
