Preface

The island of Java is home to several major languages. Javanese—spoken mainly in Central and East Java—is the world’s 11th or 12th largest language with well over 80 million native speakers. It has the oldest and fullest recorded history of any Austronesian language. It also has been of considerable interest to scholars because of the system of speech levels or styles found in many Javanese varieties. Sundanese—spoken in West Java—has over 27 million speakers, and Madurese—spoken on the neighbouring island of Madura and throughout parts of East Java—is the third largest local language, with counts ranging from 7 to 13 million speakers. Varieties of Sundanese and Madurese as well as Balinese and Sasak—the geographically, historically, and linguistically related languages on the neighbouring islands of Bali and Lombok—also have speech level systems. Each of these languages displays a range of dialects, isolects, continua, and contact varieties and yet they have received relatively little attention from linguists