Phonological variations of Bahasa Indonesia spoken by Dani People in Group Communication in Surabaya

The relationship between language and society has encouraged the researcher in conducting this study. The research is intended to describe and identify the phonological variations of Bahasa Indonesia spoken by Dani people in group communication in Surabaya. The data of the study are limited only to the words of Bahasa Indonesia that are spoken by Dani people. As the basis of analysis, the theories on the phonological variations and the ethnic background of Papua, especially Dani people, are presented in the second chapter. Furthermore, the linguistic theory is also reviewed. This theory becomes the basis on analysing the phonological variations of Bahasa Indonesia spoken by Dani people. To equip the researcher with knowledge on the background of the analysed words, the characteristics and the geographical features of Dani are also included. In analysing the phonological variations of Bahasa Indonesia, the researcher employed the funnel approach consisting of exploratory, descriptive, and explanatory stages as the research design. Furthermore, in this study, the researcher used content analyses, case study, field note, reflective analysis and practical linguistic analysis. By employing those techniques, the researcher did three stages, i.e., collect the data, analyse them and discuss them. As a result of the analysis, it can be seen that there are phonological variations of Bahasa Indonesia spoken by Dani people. It can be deduced that there are six phonological variations of Bahasa Indonesia spoken by Dani people in group communication in Surabaya. They are vowel change, consonant change, semi-vowel change, consonant dropping, final syllable dropping, and contraction (merger). There are factors behind the phonological variations of Bahasa Indonesia spoken by Dani people. The influencing factors that support the variations are constructed based on the interference of Dani people's mother tongue and on the idea of 'ease of articulation'. Ease of articulation is the idea of changing the sound speech in articulatory simplification. Finally, it is expected that the result of this study can contribute theoretically and practically to English Department students and EFL teachers. The English Department students can take this study as the additional materials and/or as examples when taking the subjects of Sociolinguistics. For EFL teachers, they can use this study as examples of Bahasa Indonesia spoken by Dani people in teaching Sociolinguistics. This study also contributes some inputs tor Dani people, as they can understand that they have spoken the phonological variations of Bahasa Indonesia and realize that it is influenced by their mother tongue