PLURILINGUAL SOCIETIES WITH MIGRANT LANGUAGES IN KARIMUNJAWA, INDONESIA

Karimunjawa is inhabited by Javanese, Buginese, Maduranese, etcetera. They live harmoniously in the surrounding not only with the same language but also with different ones. This article aims at elaborating the interlingual communication and intercultural discourse, mutual comprehensibility, and language transgenerational process. Using convenient, snowball, and event sampling techniques, we chose the respondents -- 12 out of 23 students of the Safinatul Huda Senior and Junior High school students whose parents are intercultural and the twelve students' parents. We used observation, questionnaire, and interview to gather the data. The observation was used to record the situation when the respondents were communicating each other using different languages. The questionnaire was used to ask the respondents' sociolinguistic profiles and multilingual competences, while the interview was used to confirm the use of different languages and the trans-generational process of language maintenance. Referential, inferential, and distributional methods were used. The result shows that intercultural communication implies intercultural discourse and mutual intelligibility of not only the same codes or languages but also different ones. Children are exposed to bahasa Indonesia as the first language and language of instruction at school. This study can support Stevens (2008) proposing mutual comprehensibility supporting Hocket's mutual intelligibility.