Indonesian in North Kalimantan: A melting pot of national, regional and local features

This paper describes some features of the Indonesian variant spoken in the Province of
North Kalimantan, in particular the language spoken in the island of Tarakan and some of
the areas gravitating around it, namely the towns of Sekatak and of Malinau. Despite the
presence of two traditional Malay dialects in the adjacent Provinces of East Kalimantan,
Berau Malay and Kutai Malay, the language of interethnic communication spoken in North
Kalimantan did not develop directly from those two dialects. In fact it developed from a
combination of elements, comprising features of the national language used in the
education systems, in the press, in politics, and of its colloquial variant originally spoken in
the capital and that spread in the area thanks to the many immigrants from other regions.
Few elements of Eastern Borneo Malay dialects and local lexemes and expressions enrich
this variant where national, regional and local features merge.