Betawi Malay
Language Melayu-Polinesia
Attenuated
Other and rejected name forms
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A Malay variety formed at Batavia out of the contact language of its incomers, with Hokkien, Portuguese, Dutch, Javanese, Sundanese and Balinese borrowings, whose features later entered conversational Indonesian across the country.
Spreading without its speakers
The best-known features of this variety — the suffix -in for -kan, final é in words like ape and kenape, the pronouns gue and lu, both from Hokkien — are now heard across Indonesia, used by speakers who do not call themselves Betawi and have never lived in Jakarta. The spread ran through film, television serials and later social media.
The consequence needs careful statement: what spread is a set of features, not the language. Full Betawi, with its own vocabulary and grammar, is spoken in the Betawi kampung and contracts with them. The two facts are often confused, so that the language is taken to be strengthening when what is strengthening is its loans.
Sahibul hikayat, palang pintu, and a heartland that moved
Two speech forms keep alive a Betawi register not used in ordinary conversation. Sahibul hikayat is the delivery of long narrative — prophetic stories, Malay tales, local hikayat — by one performer before listeners, in a register higher and more measured than conversation. Palang pintu is the exchange of pantun with displays of silat at the fetching of a bride, in which two parties trade verses until one gives the other leave to enter; as with pasambahan in Minangkabau, the business is not stated outright but arrived at through an agreed form.
What distinguishes this language's situation from nearly every other regional language is that its heartland moved. Jakarta's growth pushed Betawi speakers out of the city that produced the language, into Bekasi, Depok, Tangerang and the southern fringe, so that the fullest Betawi is today spoken outside the boundaries of the city it is named for, while what circulates inside the city is the Jakarta register of Indonesian, which takes much from Betawi without being Betawi. The difference between the two is frequently blurred, including by Jakarta speakers themselves, and the blurring makes the language look far stronger than it is.
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