The most valuable contributions to a linguistic description of Surabayan Javanese have been made by Soetoko et al. Despite the pride for their dialect and its constant use at home, speakers of Surabayan Javanese fear conversing in their mother tongue in areas where the classical speech level system is still prominent and switch to Bahasa Indonesia. By the means of a brief typological summary of politeness systems throughout the world, I demonstrate that Surabayan Javanese can be categorized as a T-V language. While this development is best observed in younger speakers, many older speakers in Surabaya now also disregard the refined speech level system such as the one used in Central Javanese.

This change makes Surabayan Javanese pragmatically similar to colloquial Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) and many European languages such as German, French, and Spanish. Central Javanese is a very prominent example of the extensive use of a speech level system, similar to Japanese and Korean, however Surabayan Javanese on the contrary does not feature this system anymore and has given way to a binary T-V distinction, especially with regards to the language of younger speakers. This thesis shows how politeness in Surabayan Javanese is expressed despite its sounding discourteous to the Central Javanese ear. A tentative linguistic description of salient aspects of its grammar follows, and special attention is given to the linguistic etiquette of Surabayan Javanese, as it is known to Central Javanese speakers for being very impolite and rude. First, a discussion on Javanese dialectology is presented, then sociolinguistic issues of the dialect of Surabaya are addressed with the focus on the dialect’s prevalence in the media. The city and its surroundings are known for their peculiar dialect, which exhibits very characteristic phonological and morphological features not found in other dialects of Javanese. This thesis aims to examine the Javanese dialect of the city of Surabaya, East Java, Indonesia.

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