DISTANT LANGUAGE, CLOSE LANGUAGE, AND IMPOLITENESS IN THE INDONESIAN CONTEXT

This paper brings up distant language, close language, and impoliteness in the Indonesian context. Use of language, the writer argues, should be probably best viewed from or directed to politeness, i.e. distancing politeness (distant language) or closeness politeness (close language). This probability or tendency also applies in the Indonesian context. The writer suggests that Indonesian distant language be formal, indirect, and non-literal, and that Indonesian close language be informal, direct, and literal. This dyadic distant-close language in the Indonesian context has been developed from the inspiring theories of the negative-positive face by Goffman [1], the negative-positive politeness strategies by Brown and Levinson [2], the respect-solidarity politeness by Renkema [3], and the politeness-friendship by Jumanto [4]. The distant language is addressed to hearers with power factor, while the close language is addressed to hearers with solidarity factor, the types of hearer of which are elaborated from the theory of Brown and Gilman [5]. Incompetence, ignorance, or mistaken use of these two variants may hint impoliteness, i.e. rude situations or awkward situations in interpersonal interactions. This impoliteness has been analyzed and then brought to discussions based on the data or corpora in the Indonesian context.