Borrowing Versus Code-switching

Indonesia is a country with a multiplicity of languages, including many indigenous ones as well as the official language, Indonesian, and its close relative, Malay. Richard Nivens, in this study, examines the language contact of West Tarangan and Malay in a town in the Aru Islands in southeast Maluku, Indonesia. In his introduction, Nivens sets forth the three goals of his study. His first one is to contribute an additional language pair to the growing field of language contact research. His second goal is "to determine the effect of idiolectal differences, discourse context, and the availability of equivalent lexical units on the occurrence of embedded-language elements in a bilingual corpus." Third, he proposes a "psycholinguistically realistic accounting of the longer stretches of Malay occuring in the corpus...." Nivens received his Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of Hawaii in 1998.