Variation and change in progress

Abstract This study reports on variation in final [‑a] ~ [‑e] in Jakarta Indonesian (JI), a new urban variety of Indonesian that emerged from contact between Standard Indonesian (SI) and Betawi, a variety of Malay spoken in the capital of Indonesia. The study incorporates both apparent- and real-time approaches to examining change in this variable, using two large-scale naturalistic speech corpora from three generations of speakers. In the examination of this variable over time, we find that the standard SI form is now predominant in colloquial JI, a change that was led by women and speakers with higher educational backgrounds. The study provides insight into the development of a new language variety within a multilingual environment.