Sound Symbolism in Indonesian Language on Social Media

Abstract

This research discusses sound symbolism in Bahasa Indonesia on social media through a study of natural semantic metalinguistics, which is grounded in the various types of sound symbolism in Indonesian. The objective of this research was to identify types of sound symbolism in bahasa Indonesia, describe the meanings of sound symbolism in Indonesian, and explain the extent to which Indonesian speakers associate certain sounds with specific meanings. This study employed a qualitative approach as a research procedure to produce descriptive data in the form of written and spoken. The data consisted of social media captions about sound symbolism. The sources of data included social media captions from Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter. The data collection techniques used included note-taking techniques to record data obtained from captions on social media and interview techniques conducted to gather data on the associative meanings of sound symbolism among Indonesian speakers. The analysis results indicated that there were four types of sound symbolism in the Indonesian language namely corporeal sound symbolism, imitative sound symbolism, synthetic sound symbolism, and conventional sound symbolism. corporeal and conventional sound symbolism contained emotional meanings that depict a direct relationship between sounds and the physical or emotional experiences of speakers. In the meaning of corporeal symbolism, expressive intonation was articulated by speakers to describe an exaggerated meaning of an object. This intonation appeared in adjectives, perceived as vocal elongation accompanied by the insertion of the vowel /u/, with interjection meanings divided into positive and negative meanings. Imitative sound symbolism (onomatopoeia) was formed from imitating sounds as well as sounds that produce movement. Synthetic sound symbolism with sounds /a/ and /u/ could also express high meanings; in synthetic sound symbolism, the vowel sound /u/ represents semantic components related to tall objects or people, as seen in words like bubung (roof) and gedung (building). Conventional sound symbolism included the phonestheme /-gel/, which means movement, as well as /-am/ and /-ang/, which have opposite meanings where /-am/ means dark and /-ang/ means bright.