Address forms, social structures and social relations in postcolonial Sasak communities

Abstract Address forms have been investigated in various social contexts in association with solidarity and power (Brown, Roger & Albert Gilman. 1960. The pronouns of power and solidarity. In Thomas Albert Sebeok (ed.), Style in language , 252–281. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). In Indo-European languages, solidarity is often linked with singular pronouns, while power is associated with plural pronouns. Anchimbe and Janney (2017. Postcolonial pragmatics. In Anne Baron, Yueguo Gu & Gerard Steen (eds.), The Routledge handbook of pragmatics , 1st edn., 105–120. London: Routledge, Yusra et al. (2023. Borrowing of address forms for dimensions of social relation in a contact-induced multilingual community. Journal of Politeness Research 19(1). 217–248) and other studies have extended this concept to non-European communities with multi-complex social structures and relations. They found that, beyond the solidarity and power continuum, other forms of relations exist, each represented by particular address forms. This study aims to refine these concepts by observing address forms in the Sasak communities. Through ethnographic observation of communication in key community centers, the study investigates the linkage between address forms, social structures, and social relations. By interviewing key informants and recording naturally occurring conversations, the study identifies patterned links between the forms and the conditions governing them. The study provides evidence that precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial Sasak societies have undergone significant changes, leading to increasingly complex social structures and relations. This complexity suggests that the binary solidarity-power concept should be revised and extended. Furthermore, the study displays the social dynamics that address forms can play within the postcolonial Sasak communities, highlighting the need for culture-specific refinement of the association between address forms and the nuanced dimensions of social relations.