Microsoft Word 23 ig muhartoyo ok docx

Kata kunci: bahasa Inggris gaul, komunikasi 

 

 

 

 

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 HUMANIORA Vol.5 No.1 April 2014: 197-209 

INTRODUCTION 

 

 

For human being, communication is the important part in daily life. Communication is an 

activity of exchanging and conveying information by speaking or writing among people. 

Communication may involve conventional or unconventional signals, may be intentional or 

unintentional, and may take linguistic or nonlinguistic forms. Everyday people need to communicate 

with each other, whether directly face to face or indirectly over the phone or sending messages 

through mail, e-mail, sms, and so on. 

 

Nowadays, communication is more modern and makes people easier to do communicating 

with their family or their friends which are away from them through instant messages, phone calls, and 

also video calls. All of those ways of communication can be done easily through cell phones, laptops, 

or computers. People cannot be separated with the use of their smartphones to communicate or just to 

open or to update their status on social media like Facebook or Twitter with their relatives or friends. 

This condition is not good because people are less doing direct communication, they prefer to make a 

call or to send text messages through their smartphone to communicate with someone. Whereas, the 

best way of communication  is direct communication. It is because direct communication enables 

people to keep stronger relationship with others than indirect communication that leads people to 

become passive. 

 

The important part of communication is language. People live in a world of language. 

Chomsky said studying human language is approaching some might call “human essence”, the 

distinctive tool which delivers feeling, ideas and opinions through communication. Fromkin and 

Rodman (1998) said that any child, born everywhere in the world, of any racial, geographical, social, 

economic heritage, is capable of learning any language to which he or she is exposed. The differences 

found among languages cannot be due to biological reasons. That is why many children are now 

taught other languages beside their mother tounge in school or course by their parents, so in the future 

their children will find it easier in applying for an overseas school or a job. Nowadays people with the 

ability of speaking more than one language like using bahasa Indonesia and English has more 

advantages than people who can speak one language, such as bahasa Indonesia. 

 

In communication, language is the main element. How people use language for 

communication is different from one another. When talking to someone who is older from the speaker 

people use polite ways than when talking to someone who is younger from the speaker. Holmes 

(2000) added that people’s speech reflects not only aspects of their identity such as their ethnicity, age, 

gender, and social background, it also reflects the contexts in which they are using the language. The 

way people talk reflects the formality of those context and the social roles people take in them. 

 

Language varies from one social group to another social group, from one situation to another 

situation, and from one place to another place. Variation shows that every speaker does not speak the 

same way all the time. Language varieties indicate that the speakers are distinct from members of 

other groups (Finegan, 2008:330). Language variety that signifies particular situations of use is called 

registers, it is appropriate for use in particular speech situations. There are some examples of language 

variations that are of interest to linguist according to Akmajian et al (1998), lingua francas, pidgins, 

creoles, jargon, slang, and taboo language. In this research, the focus was only on the language 

variation which could be categorized as slang. 

 

Slang becomes the part of language variation because of the need to adapt to new or different 

aspects of society and factor of social prestige. Although slang is not taught in the curriculum, it does 

not make its existence fades away. It even becomes popular among young people. Slang is informal 

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The Use of English ….. (Muhartoyo; Baby Samantha Wijaya) 

199

 

words or phrases and commonly used in speech between people from the same social group or who 

work together, it is not suitable for formal contexts and is often not in use for long. 

 

The popularity of slang nowadays makes it an interesting object to study. It will be interesting 

to find out what types of slang words that students usually use, what factors or media that influence 

young people to use slang and also the reason behind the use of slang.