THE WAKAMONO KOTOBA PHENOMENON IN INDONESIA AND JAPAN
Keywords:
wakamono kotoba, slang language, sociolinguisticAbstract
In a language, there are several factors that determine a person's speech, giving rise to language variations, one of which is the age factor (Ariyapitipun, 2007: 170). On the age factor, there are three types of language variations according to age, namely, children's language, youth language, and parents' language (Putri & Santoso: 2016, 162). In Japanese, the youth language is called wakamono kotoba. Wakamono kotoba will continue to grow following the times. The purpose of this study was to find out the wakamono kotoba phenomenon that occurred in Indonesia and Japan by distributing questionnaires to Japanese language learners in Indonesia and Japanese people in Japan and then analyzing them. The results of the questionnaire from Indonesian respondents showed that 90.6% answered that they had found wakamono kotoba. The frequency of using wakamono kotoba the most is sometimes as much as 45.2%, and the most using wakamono kotoba to friends is 78%. Respondents answered that 92.5% needed to learn wakamono kotoba, with the most reason being to facilitate communication and familiarity with Japanese people. And from the ranking of wakamono kotoba in Japan in 2021, it is known that the Indonesian respondents for the latest wakamono kotoba are only a few respondents with little known vocabulary. This is different from the resulting questionnaire of Japanese respondents, who often find wakamono kotoba showed that 82.4% found wakamono kotoba in daily activities, and 64.7% answered that wakamono kotoba was considered important to learn because it could contribute to language development and create a new Japanese language. So it can be concluded that the knowledge of Japanese language learners in Indonesia about Wakamono kotoba is still insufficient to understand wakamono kotoba. Whereas, based on the results of a questionnaire in Japan shows that wakamono kotoba is often found by Japanese people in everyday life.