The Influence of The Javanese Pronunciation of Javanese People.

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ABSTRACT

Mempelajari Bahasa Inggris memang terlihat sederhana. Namun ada satu hal yang sering kali terlupakan saat kita hendak mempelajari Bahasa Inggris, yaitu bagaimana cara mengucapkan kata dengan pelafalan yang benar dalam Bahasa Inggris.

Seseorang yang telah terbiasa menggunakan bahasa ibunya, akan mengalami kesulitan saat dia hendak mengucapkan kata dalam bahasa yang lain karena dia telah terpengaruh oleh bahasa ibunya. Hal inilah yang akan saya bahas dalam tugas akhir saya yang berjudul The Influences of the Javanese Pronunciation on the English

Pronunciation of Javanese-Speaking People.

Tugas akhir saya akan membahas tentang seberapa besar pengaruh Bahasa Jawa pada orang-orang yang sehari-hari menggunakan bahasa tersebut saat mereka belajar Bahasa Inggris, serta kesulitan apa saja yang mereka hadapi saat mereka harus melafalkan kata dalam bahasa Inggris.

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Inggris bisa belajar untuk tidak melakukan kesalahan yang sama. Dan pada akhirnya mereka bisa lebih baik saat harus berbicara dalam Bahasa Inggris.

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The Sounds

The number of students who can produce English sounds accurately

The number of students who produce English sounds inaccurately

d 15 15

l 30 -

n 30 -

r 30 -

s 30 -

z 17 13

∫ 10 20

5 25

6 24

j 30 -

k 20 10

g 21 9

ŋ 30 -

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Appendix 2

List of English Words

Vowels

[ ί:] :eat, see, bee [ _ı ] : it, sit, give [ e ] : end, bread, head [æ ] : and, back, cat [ α:] : ask, class, card [ ɒ ] : box, long, hot

[ ɔ: ] : tall, door, board

[ ʊ ] : good, foot, put

[ u: ] : blue, moon, two [ ʌ ] : bus, come, once

[ ɜ: ] : work, hurt, her

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CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Background of the Study

The use of English has developed over time. English has become an important language. But actually, about four centuries ago, not so many people used English; only five million people spoke English as their first language. Beginning in the reign of Queen Elizabeth the first, English-speaking people were spread all over the world and they made the English language more widely-known. One country that has made a remarkable contribution in spreading English is the United States of America. The United States of America uses English for their everyday communication. As the United States of America becomes one of the great world powers, many people in the world have been influenced by its life style. It means that the use of English also increases. After that, over two hundred million people use English as their first language and million more read and understand English as their second language. (Dawson 14) Considering that we are now in the twenty-first centuries, the use of English is wider than that era.

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Nowadays, English is regarded as an international language. Someone who can speak English fluently can be considered a person who can follow the world’s development. The Globalization era also forces many people to be able to speak English. For these reasons, many people try to master English language. People start to learn English language from the early stages of school, and many also take a language course to develop their English ability.

Learning English does not only deal with vocabulary or grammar. How to pronounce the English sounds seem to be one of the problems someone who is learning English has to face. In learning English we have to know how to produce English sounds correctly, because, in English words, different sounds may have different meanings, for example in the words sheep [ ∫i:p ] and ship [ ∫ıp ]. These words sound similar. The only difference occurs in the vowels [ i: ] and [ ı ]. Although the only difference is a vowel, the meanings of these words are totally different. People who have grown up without speaking English usually cannot easily pronounce the different sounds. Non-English speakers may have a tendency to mispronounce English sounds. (Dawson 4) That is the reason why we have to understand sounds when we are learning a language, so that we do not make a mistake.

This problem may occur when people who usually speak in their first language try to learn English as a second language. People from various language backgrounds, including Javanese, want to learn and understand English. But learning English pronunciation is not as simple as they think. Javanese-speaking people will find some difficulties in producing certain English sounds. This is because they are influenced by their first language, the Javanese language. I would like to analyze this problem in my

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thesis. The topic of my thesis is the Influence of the Javanese Pronunciation on the English Pronunciation of Javanese-Speaking People. I choose this topic because I would like to know how the sound system of the first language, in this case Javanese, can influence Javanese-speaking people in learning English pronunciation.

The significance of my topic is to help Javanese-speaking people learn English, especially in pronouncing English sounds. By reading my thesis, hopefully, Javanese speaking people who want to learn English will be aware of the common mistakes in learning English from their own community. Therefore, it is hoped they will not make the same mistakes.

In writing on this topic, I use thirty Javanese-speaking people as my sources of data. From these sources, I will find as much useful information as possible to analyze in my thesis. I will choose Javanese students in Maranatha Christian University. In this case I choose people from Central Java, especially those speaking in the Banyumasan Dialect. They have already learnt English for five years. They are Javanese people who regularly use their first language in their daily life when they speak with those who come from the same area. I would like to find out how far this language could influence Javanese-speaking people when they are learning English pronunciation.

My topic belongs to Phonetics and Phonology, that is, the study of speech sounds. I also use the theory of language transfer from the theory of second language acquisition, which talk about the process of how humans acquire their second language. I use the theory of English and Javanese Phonology and also the theory of language transfer to find the reason of the difficulties in pronunciation.

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Statement of the Problem

In this thesis I would like to discuss the following problems:

1. What are the English sounds that are difficult to pronounce by Javanese – speaking people?

2. What are the factors that influence them so they are faced into these difficulties? 3. If they can produce some English sounds accurately, what factors help them?

Purpose of the Study

In this thesis I would like to show:

1. The English sounds that are difficult to pronounce by Javanese-speaking people. 2. The factors that influence Javanese-speaking people so they are faced with these

difficulties.

3. The factors that help Javanese-speaking people if they can produce some English sounds accurately.

Method of Research

The method of research that I use to gathering the data consists of six steps. The first step is to make a list of English words and sentences. These words or sentences contain different English sounds. The second step is I use an English Pronunciation cassette as a guidance to compare the accurate and inaccurate sounds. The third step is to ask Javanese speaking people to read the word list I have prepared. The fourth step is classifying the data. I make a table to classify all the data that I have already found. The

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fifth step is to find out what the difficult English sounds are for Javanese-speaking people when they speak English. In the last step, I analyze why these sounds are difficult to pronounce by the Javanese-speaking people.

Organization of the Thesis

Chapter one is the Introduction. This chapter consists of the Background of the Study, Statement of the Problem, Purpose of the Study, Method of Research and the Organization of the Thesis. Chapter two consists of the Theory of the Thesis. Chapter three consists of the Discussion of the Thesis. Chapter four will be the Conclusion of the Thesis followed by Bibliography and Appendix.

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CONCLUSION

In learning English, Javanese-speaking people are faced with some difficulties.

One of the difficulties when they are going to learn English is how to pronounce the

English sounds accurately. After analyzing the data, I found that Javanese-speaking

people usually could not produce the English sound accurately because they find

differences between the sounds in the English sound system and the sounds in the

Javanese sound system. Javanese-speaking people are used to speaking Javanese as their

first language when they do conversation with others who come from the same area; as a

result, the Javanese-speaking people are greatly influenced by the Javanese language.

In this thesis, I compare the Javanese sounds with the English sounds. There are

some English sounds that are totally different or even extremely new for

Javanese-speaking people. These new sounds are difficult to pronounce by the Javanese-Javanese-speaking

people. This factor causes the Javanese-speaking people not to be able to produce some

English sounds accurately.

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The following sounds are the sounds that are difficult for the Javanese-speaking people to

pronounce

Vowels: [ i: ], [ æ ], [ з: ], [ u: ], [ α: ], [ _ı ], [ ɔ: ]

Consonants: [ v ], [ θ ], [ ð ], [ ∫ ], [ ʧ ], [ ʒ ]

The mistakes that are usually made by the Javanese-speaking people is they tend

to replace the difficult English sounds which do not occur in the Javanese-speaking

people with the Javanese sounds that have similarities with these difficult sounds

There are some English sounds that are actually not really difficult to pronounce;

however, Javanese-speaking people could not produce these sounds accurately. Sounds

[ b ], [ d ], [ k ], [ g ] also occur in Javanese pronunciation system, but in some cases,

Javanese-speaking people could not produce it accurately, for example, when these

sounds are at the end of a syllable. In the Javanese language, it is rare to find a word

which ends with these sounds; as a result, Javanese-speaking people would pronounce

these sounds inaccurately.

The other difficulties occur when the Javanese-speaking people have to

pronounce double consonants or consonant clusters at the end of the syllable. A word

with double consonants at the end of the syllable is also rare to find in the Javanese

language. They tend to omit one sound, such as in the word bank, where they will omit

the sound [ k ]; as a result, they will pronounce this word [ bʌŋ ].

The other difficulty that is found when Javanese-speaking people learn English

pronunciation is the aspiration. The use of aspiration in the English sound system and

the Javanese sound system is different. In English sound system, the sounds which have

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to be pronounced with aspiration are the voiceless sounds, while in the Javanese sound

system, the sounds that are pronounced with aspiration are the voiced sounds. This

difference leads the Javanese-speaking people into difficulty in pronouncing some

English sounds.

In some cases, Javanese-speaking people pronounce some English sounds

inaccurately because they have a tendency to read a word based on the letters that are

written. They think this would help them in producing some English sounds that are

difficult but actually it will lead them into producing the wrong sounds.

The Javanese-speaking people found that the sounds in their first language are

not the same as English as their second language. They are used to speaking Javanese,

but then when they have to speak English, they have to learn some sounds that are

different from their first language. That is the reason why the Javanese-speaking people

find some difficulties in learning English pronunciation. This situation is called negative

transfer.

We know that there are some difficulties for Javanese-speaking people to

produce some English sounds; on the other hand, we can also see that there are some

English sounds which are produced accurately by Javanese-speaking people because

these sounds occur in the Javanese sound system.

Those sounds are:

Vowels: [ i ], [ e ], [ ʌ ], [ ɒ ], [ ə ]

Consonants: [ m ], [ w ], [ n ], [ s ], [ j ], [ h ], [ ŋ ]

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The Javanese-speaking people do not find any difficulties in producing these

sounds. These sounds are produced in the same way in both the English and Javanese

sound system.

The similarities between English pronunciation and Javanese pronunciation

make the Javanese-speaking people easy to produce some English sounds. This situation

is called positive transfer.

So, in this case, the first language is actually helpful when someone who usually

speaks in the first language wants to learn a second language, as long as there are

similarities between the first and second languages.

Finally, in learning English, especially to understand the sounds, there are

several things that we have to know as Javanese-speaking people. In my opinion,

Javanese-speaking people are expected to know the differences between the Javanese

sound system and the English sound system. This is important because by knowing the

differences, Javanese-speaking people can practice speaking in English in the right way.

They have to know how to produce the English sounds accurately by understanding the

position of the tongue, the place and manner of articulation when they want to

pronounced the English sounds. After that, Javanese-speaking people are expected to do

a lot of practice to improve.

The other things that are also important when Javanese-speaking people want to

learn English are reading and listening. These two things are really helpful to improve

Javanese-speaking people’s ability to speak English in order that they would not find

any difficulties in learning English pronunciation anymore.

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Aitchison, Jane. Linguistics: An Introduction. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1999. Deterding, David. The Sound of English. Singapore: Prentice-Hall Pearson Education

Asia Pte Ltd, 1998.

Dulay, Heidi. Language Two. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1982.

Ellis, Rod. The Study of Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Fromkin, Victoria. An Introduction to Language. Orlando: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1998.

Jones, Daniel. An Outline of English Phonetics. Cambridge: W. Heffer and Sons Ltd, 1980.

Katamba, Francis. An Introduction to Phonology. England: Longman Group UK Limited, 1989.

Mangunsuwito, S.A. Kamus Bahasa Jawa. Bandung: W. Yrama Widya, 2002. Simanjuntak, Herpinus. Bahasa Inggris Sistem Jilid 1. Bekasi: Visipro, 2006.

Stern, H.H. Fundamental Concept of Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.

The Influence of The Javanese Pronunciation of Javanese People.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

CONCLUSION