Intergenerational Dialect Transmission in Sasak: Evidence from a Geo-Tagged Corpus

Abstract

The Sasak language of Lombok Island, Indonesia, faces increasing pressure due to urbanization, infrastructure expansion, and growing exposure to national media, raising concerns about intergenerational dialect attrition. Despite growing scholarly attention to Sasak linguistics, no prior study has systematically examined how dialectal features are transmitted across generational cohorts using spatially anchored corpus evidence. This study aims to investigate which phonological, lexical, and morphosyntactic features of Sasak exhibit the highest degree of intergenerational stability, and how geographic location modulates the fidelity of dialect transmission across three generational cohorts. A variationist sociolinguistic approach combined with corpus-based analysis and Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping was employed. Data were collected from 180 native Sasak speakers across 15 geo-tagged villages spanning all five dialect zones, using semi-structured interviews, word-list elicitation, and a dialect perception survey. Acoustic analysis, lexical frequency profiling, and morphosyntactic tagging were conducted using ELAN and Praat. Findings reveal that phonological features consistently exhibit higher intergenerational stability (mean Intergenerational Transmission Index/ITI = 0.78 for Generation 1 to Generation 2; 0.71 for Generation 2 to Generation 3) than lexical features (mean retention = 58.3% for Generation 3). Urban-peripheral zones exhibit accelerated lexical attrition and phonological convergence toward the Ngeno-Ngene prestige dialect, whereas rural-interior communities maintain higher dialectal fidelity. These results underscore the critical role of geographic and social factors in shaping dialect transmission, with implications for language documentation and revitalization in Nusa Tenggara Barat.