Student Mobility and Heritage Language Preservation

Abstract

Yogyakarta, known as the educational city, has attracted students from different regions to move to Yogyakarta and continue their studies there. This mobility allows the students to interact with others whose different languages and cultural backgrounds. The interaction may positively or negatively impact their heritage language preservation. Being exposed to different languages and cultures may foster multilingualism and cultural diversity. On the other hand, it may also result in lost heritage languages, especially when students switch from using their heritage language to using Indonesian when communicating with others. Losing a language is something that we do not expect. Thus, research on this topic is necessary to identify the challenges of heritage language preservation. This paper examines students’ attitudes toward their heritage languages: whether they have positive or negative attitudes toward heritage language preservation. A small-scale analysis is conducted on students at Universitas Sanata Dharma. The methods applied in gathering the data are distributing a questionnaire and completing a structured interview with some selected students. The findings show that the respondents have a positive attitude toward the heritage language, and their mobility influences heritage language preservation because it leads to less exposure toward the language.