Linguistic politeness in Palembangnese directives in Indonesia and its implications for university teaching and learning

This paper presents a study of linguistic politeness in Palembang Malay language in Indonesia. It is a language spoken in South Sumatera, Indonesia, henceforth referred to as Palembangnese. The overall goal of this paper is to contribute to the wider literature on the use of directives. However, in particular, this paper aims to enrich the current understanding of data from linguistic politeness in Palembangnese, especially the usage of Palembangnese when the students are making directives, both in their verbal interactions with each other and with their professors or lecturers. A large number of studies have been conducted on directives in relation to politeness in different languages. However, up to now, limited research concerning the politeness and the use of directives in Palembangnese has been conducted. Twenty Indonesian students in Indonesia were recruited as participants. The participants of this study were native Palembangnese speakers in Indonesia (PSinI). This research based its argument on a corpus data elicited by means of a Palembangnese version of Written Discourse Completion Tasks (WDCTs), demographic information questionnaire, and semi-structured interviews. The data were analyzed and focused on five major politeness strategies proposed by Brown and Levinson (1978). The results of the study contribute to the increased understanding of politeness and the use of directives in Palembangnese. This present research contributes to teaching and learning in university settings by providing better understandings of the association between cultures, including beliefs and values, and politeness strategies of students from Palembangnese language backgrounds