THE MECHANISM OF LANGUAGE DEATH

A REFLECTION TO OUR LOCAL LANGUAGE

Abstract

A lingua franca is important for a multilingual country. For this reason, Bahasa
Indonesia is designed as a lingua franca for more than 700 local languages in Indonesia
to unite people from different social and cultural backgrounds. During colonialism era,
Bahasa Indonesia seemed successful in creating a sense of identity as Indonesians.
However, the domination of Bahasa Indonesia tends to replace Sundanese, particularly
in children. Sundanese seems poorly transferred to young generation. This paper
proposes a research toward the mechanism of language death as a reflection for
Sundanese language which undergoes shifting; a process that may lead to language
death.