Osing

Linguistically Osing is a Javanese variety: it is mutually intelligible with East Javanese across most conversation, and its differences lie in particular sounds, a body of vocabulary, and forms lost elsewhere. In standing it is treated otherwise: the regency government designates it a regional language in its own right and teaches it as a local-content subject under that name, and its speakers call it a language, not a dialect.

The two need not be reconciled. Linguistic and recognitional measures answer different questions, and this encyclopedia records both without choosing between them. What is not recorded is the claim that Osing is “not Javanese at all”, which circulates in regional promotional writing and is supported by no linguistic source.

In Banyuwangi mocoan takes place: the reading of the Lontar Yusup — the story of the prophet Joseph in sung verse — by pemaca societies at selamatan, circumcisions and the village-cleansing cycle. The reading alternates: one man carries the sung line, another answers with construal and commentary, and the listeners follow through the night.

The existence of working manuscript-reading societies bears on the argument in the previous section. A variety that some parties call a dialect of Javanese has here a textual community running under its own name, on its own calendar, with its own melodies distinct from mocoan elsewhere in Java. This does not settle the language-or-dialect question — evidence of this kind cannot settle it — but it shows that what is at issue is not merely an accumulation of sound differences.

The Lontar Yusup manuscripts the societies use are held by pemaca families and copied down the generations. The recording made for this entry was done with the societies' oral permission, and the complete recording is not published at their request.