I am involved in a number of ongoing projects on language variation and change in the languages of Indonesia, with a particular focus on language shift in the Indonesian context.
Language shift in Indonesia
Cohn, A. and M. Ravindranath. 2014. Local languages in Indonesia: Language maintenance or language shift? Linguistik Indonesia 32.2: 131-148.
Ravindranath, M. and A.C. Cohn. 2014. Can a language with millions of speakers be endangered? Journal of Southeast Asian Linguistics 7: 64-75.
Language shift using census data
Pepinsky, T., M.R. Abtahian, and A.C. Cohn. 2022. Urbanization, ethnic diversity, and language shift in Indonesia. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. DOI: 10.1080/01434632.2022.2055761
Abtahian, M.R., A.C. Cohn and T. Pepinsky. 2016. Modeling social factors in language shift. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 242: 139-170.
Language shift using survey data
Cohn, A., Bowden, J., McKinnon, T., Ravindranath, M., Simanjuntak, R., Taylor, B. & Yanti. 2013. Kuesioner Pengunaan Bahasa Sehari-hari.
Variation in Jakarta Indonesian
I am also involved in collaborative projects that examine variation in Jakarta Indonesian, using the Jakarta Indonesian corpus collected under the direction of the Jakarta Field Station of the Max Planck Institute.
I have collaborated with Abby Cohn, Novi Djenar, and Rachel Vogel on a project examining variation in 1st singular pronoun use in Jakarta Indonesian. This paper is part of a special issue of Asia Pacific Language Variation on variation and change in Indonesian languages. Students involved in this project include Rachel Vogel (Cornell University) and Edgar Yau (UR Linguistics ’20)
Abtahian, M.R., A.C. Cohn, D.N.Djenar, and R.C. Vogel. Jakarta Indonesian first-person singular pronouns: form, function, and variation. Asia-Pacific Language Variation 7(2): 187-216.
Maya Ravindranath Abtahian 