Language shifts as a catalyst for social and educational cohesion in multilingual societies

Although the Indonesian New Capital City, or Ibu Kota Nusantara (IKN), is a potential living laboratory of a multilingual society, studies investigating the extent to which language shift conditions stimulate educational cohesion remain limited. To fill this gap, this research aims to investigate language shifts at schools in IKN to achieve equitable education. The participants were teachers and high school students who lived in three subdistricts of IKN (Sepaku, Penajam Pasir Utara, and Muara Jawa). We conducted eight interviews and two classroom observations to capture the participants’ linguistic backgrounds and to document language shifts. The interviews were then developed into a 2-million-word corpus of spoken language (Spoken Corpus Data of Vernacular Indonesian). The corpus was analyzed using frequency and concordance features in AntConc to capture patterns of language shift. The findings reveal that regional migrants from Java Island (Central and East Java ethnicities), South Kalimantan Island (Banjar ethnicity), and South Sulawesi Island (Bugis ethnicity) constitute the dominant demographic in IKN. This study also found that some linguistic shifts occurred, including phonological changes such as consonant softening, morphological simplification, and syntactic adjustments aimed at building stronger community ties both within schools and in society.