Shaping Communities Through Language Practices, Ideologies, and Mobility: The Diaspora language of the Arab-descent Communities in Surakarta, Surabaya, and Jakarta.

Shaping Communities Through Language Practices, Ideologies, and Mobility: The Diaspora language of the Arab-descent Communities in Surakarta, Surabaya, and Jakarta. Luigi Sausa - Ph.D. Student l.sausa@unior.it Supervisors: Antonia Soriente - University of Naples “L’Orientale” Aurora Donzelli - Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna Riccardo Contini - University of Naples “L’Orientale” Abstract Amid extensive scholarly discussions on Indonesia's Islamization and Arabization, the semiotic articulation of these indexical relationships has remained largely uncharted. This dissertation fills this gap by providing an ethnographic account of the semiotic register of Arab descendants in Indonesia, focusing on how language practices shape identity within this diasporic community. This work explores the diverse identities within this community, which have been shaped by a history of migratory waves and interactions that have fostered connections among various local and transregional actors. Engaging with broader discussions on cultural and linguistic transformations related to South-to-South migration, religious language, and standardization processes, this study challenges prevailing views that often limit the Arab diaspora in Indonesia to associations with prominent religious figures. Instead, it highlights a neglected aspect of Arab-Indonesian identity: the semiotic registers and language practices of Arab descendants. Additionally, it brings into academic discussion the impact of more recent migration flows that follow older genealogical ties and new transnational opportunities. This dissertation is guided by the following key research questions: How do the language practices of Arab descendants—situated at the crossroads of Indonesia's complex linguistic ecology and the historical and ideological fabric of the Arabic language, which ties it closely to Arab identity—shape their diasporic identity? More specifically, how do these practices, particularly in relation to Arabic—a language highly valued in the national context and considered sacred, yet often regarded as non-native—contribute to social cohesion and self-representation within this community? Based on long-term fieldwork in the urban Arab districts of Jakarta, Surakarta, and Surabaya, this research explores how people construct, build, and imagine a collective belonging to a distinctive locality through verbal interaction in informal gatherings, ceremonies, and music performances across various urban settings, where a constellation of signs associated with Arabic linguistic elements plays a significant role. The people of Arab descent in Indonesia use the term jamaah (group) to refer to their community. Although they are often described as Hadrami, reflecting their ancestral origins in the Hadramawt Valley in Yemen, the jamaah rarely use the label Hadrami themselves, as it anchors a dynamic community to a fixed geographical origin, imposing a specific connotation that clashes with the diasporic nature of the community. This labeling process compels the community to conform to an idealized notion that a group must inherently be tied to a specific location and language, whether Indonesia or Hadramawt. By contrast, jamaah—which indexes descendants of the diaspora in Indonesia but is also used to refer to newer arrivals of Arab ethnicity—emphasizes self-identification through mobility and community engagement, core aspects of this group’s diasporic identity. The core idea of this work is that an indexical relationship exists between a language variant, the Hadramawt region, the Arab world, Islam, and a distinctive urban diasporic Indonesian locality. This relationship is unsteady, as it is continually negotiated in each conversational turn and stable in its association with a social unity. This semiotic register—framed as Bahasa Jamaah (Language of the Jamaah)—reflects a dynamic form of self-representation within the community. Transcending a single setting, speakers draw from a constellation of signs that traverse both the geographical landscape linking Indonesia with the Arab world and the temporal and sociocultural landscape woven with the history of Islam, the Arabs, and the Arabic language. While these connections are relatively stable, they are also subject to continuous negotiation and situational adaptation, revealing an intermittent, context-dependent bond between Bahasa Jamaah and the Arab-Indonesian community. By weaving together insights from commentaries on language use, field observations, and analyses of spontaneous conversations, I examine the situational nature of this indexical connection to grasp how this unsteady register, yet anchored to a social unity, is actively renegotiated in each conversational turn. Methodologically, this study employs a fine-grained ethnographic approach, drawing on a collection of audiovisual and transcribed naturalistic data from spontaneous conversations in informal gatherings (majlas). My initial encounter with the community began in 2018, with formal research conducted over three years, from 2021 to 2024. This extended engagement allowed for an in-depth exploration of how, within specific interactional contexts, Bahasa Jamaah serves as more than a linguistic style; it animates a social persona, a social type, and establishes social cohesion through shared ways of speaking, dressing, and acting based on context, activity, and participants. This dissertation offers a nuanced perspective on the roles of language and mobility in forming diasporic communities. It contributes to broader discussions on cultural identity, migration, and the interplay between contemporary society’s local, global, and transregional forces. This work will be of interest to scholars in linguistics, diaspora studies, and anyone keen on understanding how language functions as a conduit for social cohesion and identity formation in diverse settings.