Arabic in Selected Indonesian Linguistic Landscapes: Lexical Borrowing, Semantic Transformation, and Linguistic Localization
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Arabic has long contributed to the Indonesian linguistic repertoire through lexical borrowing, but its contemporary use extends beyond established loanwords into everyday spoken and digitally mediated communication. This study examines how Arabic linguistic resources are used, transformed, and localized in selected Indonesian communicative settings. Employing a descriptive qualitative design, the study draws on field observations of naturally occurring student interactions, more than 100 selected Arabic-containing linguistic instances from three WhatsApp groups, and selected previous empirical studies as supplementary comparative material. The data were analyzed at lexical, phrase, morphological, and syntactic levels, with particular attention to recurrent forms, shared contextual meanings, and deviations from Standard Arabic. The findings reveal several forms of Arabic-Indonesian linguistic interaction: recurrent lexical use and orthographic or phonological variation, phrase-level reinterpretation, hybrid morphological constructions combining Arabic lexical bases with locally available patterns, and sentence-level grammatical variation. The evidence for localization is strongest where nonstandard forms recur across interactions and carry meanings shared by members of the relevant speech communities, whereas some sentence-level variations are more cautiously interpreted as possible effects of cross-linguistic interference. These findings suggest that Arabic in Indonesia functions not only as a historical source of lexical borrowing but also as an active linguistic resource that is continually reshaped through contemporary multilingual communicative practices. The study contributes to research on Arabic–Indonesian language contact by distinguishing more carefully between interference, variation, and emerging patterns of linguistic localization.
Author: Hisyam Zaini
Institution: Sunan Kalijaga State Islamic University Yogyakarta
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7225242480