International Journal of Current Science Research and Review

Recent studies have reported that the use of language does not merely reflect on the communicative function, but also identifies the social status of the speakers. This research presents an explanation and of these findings in terms of the use of Jakartanese personal pronouns gue by non-Jakartan regarding the construction of social identity seen from the perspective of Social Identity Theory (SIT). Observation was employed to investigate the occurrence of this pronoun in conversations among the participants, and semi-structured interviews are used to find out the underlying motivations. Results show that by using gue, participants undergo the process of social Identity Theory and are able to enact stances, mostly familiarity and ‘coolness’ which becomes a prime aspect for them to construct self-identity.


INTRODUCTION
Language is a socially shared code, a complex and dynamic system representing messages in exchange communication. Language as speech is built on eight parts, including pronouns that become the primary focus of this study. According to Errington (1985), pronouns are assumed to be the most salient features in conversation. Thus, speakers are said to be aware of the meaning, including the social significance. In a grammatical context, personal pronouns function to index speakers in conversation. As a critical part of grammar structure in language communication, personal pronouns become a key identification in multilingual communities. It helps to determine that the variant of personal pronoun being employed by a speaker has its specific purpose and motivation lies behind it that contribute to self-identity construction (MacIntyre, 2017). The study of personal pronouns not only functions to index the speaker's identity but also to determine the membership status of the ingroup (people who belong to a particular community) and outgroup (people who come from outside a specific community) in society. The result of a personal pronoun study shows the analysis of motivation that drives the participants to choose a particular or to shift from one to another variety of personal pronouns. Indonesia is a multilingual country in which the majority of the citizens grow up speaking a regional language as ingroup interactions. As a means of adaptation, the citizens vary their speaking styles to conform to multiple communities (Manns, 2012). Bahasa Indonesia has an open pronominal system. There are various forms for referring to speaker and addressee, such as personal pronouns that speakers relatively quickly adopt for first-and second-person reference (Djenar, Ewing, & Manns, 2017). Bahasa Indonesia is the official language that prescriptively should be used in conversation. However, having multiple and various ethnicities does give rise to different local languages. For instance, the Javanese language is associated with Java ethnicity, Sundanese is associated with Sunda ethnicity and many more. The same case happens with the Jakartan language, which is linked to a social group of people living in Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia. This local language has so-called Bahasa Gaul with the most known language variants: personal pronoun gue and their variants gua. Unlike other local languages that have a single thought of a language identical to a particular social group, the Jakartan language has more than that. It also generates a speaking style and more on identity as Gaul (Smith-Hefner, 2007). Djenar et al. (2017) state that this language is commonly used by Indonesian youth, and it is an essential element that informs the nature of the youth language. Further, Bahasa Gaul or the language of sociability could be understood as an informal Bahasa Indonesia heavily influenced by the Jakartan dialect to accentuate an attitude of casual ease, cool cosmopolitanism, flexible and serene interaction, and a sense of belonging among the speakers. It is further explained that in contrast to formal Bahasa Indonesia, which is considered stiff, the speakers attempt to detach this persona by speaking using Jakartan language to achieve an attitude of playfulness.

Stance
Du Bois (2007) defines stance as an act by individuals achieved through evaluating objects, positioning self and others, and aligning with other speakers. Enacting stances involves practicing alignment in conversation to help people define their sense of society (Djenar et al., 2017). Jaffe (2009) supported this idea and mentioned that stance had become an essential focus in studying style and language variation. In addition, Eckert (2012) posits that social categories are built around common stances through social practice. These stances are enacted in discourse through linguistic resources drawn from the wider community. Eventually, through the repetition of stances, styles emerge as stabilized ways of doing things linked to situations and social identities (Djenar et al., 2017). From this idea, thus, studying stance can reveal the processes by which individual performances are indexically associated with social meanings. An example study on stance and indexicality is Kiesling (2004), who examined the term dude. The findings show that the use of dude by young American men to index stances of effortlessness came to help constitute masculinity as a social identity. Tajfel (1974) defines Social Identity Theory (SIT) as part of an individual's self-concept, which derives from his knowledge of his membership in a social group and the emotional significance attached to that membership. Emotional significance is determined by the likes and dislikes of the subject that are settled dispositions to find a certain situation pleasant or distressing. Another theory on social identity, Meyerhoff (2006), describes SIT as intergroup relations in which language can be used as a key identification of ingroup members over outgroup members and testing or maintaining boundaries between groups. It was developed to explain how individuals create and define their place in society (Meyerhoff, 2006). As mentioned in Social identity Theory (SIT), the term group can be expanded to the social class, which refers to a categorization system based on attributes such as occupation, aspirations, or life choices. These attributes provide a valuable basis for grouping individuals together. Social Identity Theory (SIT) is marked by the presence of salient language that refers to a condition in which a language variant is dominantly being perceived/heard. For example, suppose a group identity where the speaker belongs is more salient than the personal identity of the speaker. In that case, thus, the language behavior of the speaker will tend to accentuate the uniformity and the normal way of talking for a member of that group. Giles and Johnson (1981) add that if language is a salient marker of group membership, the individual may face linguistics adaptation that may result in subtractive bilingualism or even language erosion if many members of a particular group assimilate into another to achieve a more positive group identity. Social Identity Theory (SIT) is built on three psychological processes: social categorization, social identification, and social comparison. These three aspects are the process in which individuals may proceed to construct self-identity. Social categorization refers to a process classifying people into groups based on particular traits, characteristics, or behavior in order to identify people to which they belong. This process later will create and define the place of an individual in society. Social identification is the process in which people become emotionally invested in their group membership which leads them to behave in a way they believe the group members should behave. As a result of social identification, individuals' self-esteem is impacted positively by the status of their groups. In addition, appropriate behavior is defined by reference to norms of group people belong to. Social comparison is when people compare their group with another group in terms of prestige and social standing. SIT believes that to maintain individual self-esteem, they need to perceive their group (in-group) has higher social standing than the other groups (out-group). Social comparisons between groups are focused on establishing distinctiveness between one's own and other groups. Several linguists postulate that positively valued psychological distinctiveness aims to achieve an acceptable form of social identity, which can be attained by establishing appropriate kinds of intergroup comparison. Further, another theory on social comparison mentioned that dominant social groups tend to mark themselves off symbolically as distinct from the groups they dominate and to interpret their symbols of distinctiveness as evidence of superior moral and intellectual qualities (Chambers, 2007). From the earlier discussion, it should be clear that positive social identity is inseparably a matter of mutual comparisons between groups.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY Research Procedure
The focus problem is Jakartanese personal pronouns gue, which people from outside Jakarta use. Djenar et al. (2017) mentioned that gue is associated with cosmopolitanism and portrays the life of the people living in the capital. Therefore, the use of gue by non-Jakartan people may imply certain messages that need to be addressed and investigated. Thus, two research questions were pronoun. Thus, the contextual use of gue by the participants shows their awareness of the linguistic differences. Hence, they need to modify their language and speaking style accordingly. As Chambers (2007) mentions that distinctive linguistic features may imply a sense of identity, the interview responses further investigate correspondingly with the three elements of Social Identity Theory (SIT) to find out how the use of gue is may affect the identity constructions of the speakers and the possible stances that may appear during the process. Therefore, the interview responses are discussed and arranged based on the three-core cognitive of Social identity Theory (SIT) respectively:

Social Categorization
Social categorization refers to individuals categorizing people into groups based on particular characteristics or behavior. In this research context, the behavior mentioned is the use of the Jakartanese personal pronoun gue, which becomes the main determinant of the categorization. This process later will create and define the place of individuals in society. Therefore, variation of first-person pronouns should be viewed as a strategic act of self-categorization to manage stance-taking concerns (Englebreston, 2007). Participant A categorizes two social groups regarding the use of gue between Jakartan people and people coming from outside Jakarta who is not supposedly using this pronoun. Through self-categorization, Djenar et al. (2017) propose that the selection of the personal pronoun gue enables people to present a persona that is friendly and accessible. This argument is found in the finding of Participant A who stated that gue makes her talk in a way that is not too firmly and tightly, thus the conversation is accessible for both parties. On the other hand, Participant B is aware of the Jakartan association that the personal pronoun gue carries. Further, she mentions that crazy rich and youth are those who come to mind whenever she thinks about this pronoun. This way of categorization could be explained by the argument of Smith-Hefner (2007), who states gue, which she argues is a language of sociability heavily influenced by the Jakartan dialect associated with cool cosmopolitanism and language of youth. The speakers of this language purposely conceive an attitude of playful disregard for the social strictures and status differentials of formal Indonesian, distancing themselves from what they perceive as the stiffness and inflexibility of the official standard. Young people may also use language styles associated with the Jakarta variety of Indonesian to index a Gaul identity.

Social Identification
Participant A shows an attempt and willingness to accommodate her Jakartan peers, especially the use of personal pronouns gue because she believes it enables her to talk freely and comfortably. It is in line with Djenar et al.'s (2017) study stating that gue is used to accentuate casual ease, cool cosmopolitanism, flexible and serene interaction. Participant A mentions that this pronoun helps her build her self-confidence as it sounds cool whenever she uses gue. It infers that there is emotional significance to her identification with her Jakartanese peers or group, affecting her self-esteem to be bound up with the group membership. The emotional significance could be referred to the explanation by Ohcs (1990), who suggests two contextual dimensions on defining socio-cultural context, which are affective and epistemological dispositions. Affective dispositions include participants' feelings, moods, and attitudes toward some proposition. Meanwhile, epistemological dispositions refer to some property of participants' beliefs or knowledge. These two contextual dimensions help establish their social identity, the social relationship obtained between them, and the speech act or speech activity they are endeavoring to perform. In this sense, an understanding of effect indexes and epistemological stance is basic to interpreting the socio-cultural organization of a communicative event. Here, participant A is orienting towards an attitude of self-confident cosmopolitanism. As mentioned by Silverstein (1976), personal pronouns unite both referential meaning and pragmatic meaning. In the case of the Jakartanese personal pronoun gue, it has a referential meaning that indexes the speaker's role in the interaction. Simultaneously, gue also indexes the pragmatic meaning referring to perduring social association with Jakarta, which indirectly indexes stances associated with people in the capital, such as a sense of 'coolness.' Participant A mentions that living in the capital for educational purposes and interacting with people from different regions with various ethnic and local languages has made her adaptive to society. This is supported by Boellstorf's (2002) claim stating that "among Indonesian youth there is a growing awareness of and participation in larger social networks that link them with groups cutting across geographically conceived local identities." Individual participation in networks is measurable in terms of density and multiplexity, where density is measured by the frequency of contact a person has with individuals in an identifiable cohort. Multiplexity is measured by the number of bonds shared with those individuals (siblings, neighbors, workmates, recreational partners, and so on) (Chambers, 2007). This means that for participant A the density of the network has linguistic consequences, which is to adapt and use gue. This finding aligns with the multiple studies of insular groups conducted by Chambers (2007) in Harlem, Austria, Belfast, and Philadelphia. He found that the frequent density of participation in social networks resulted in greater use of local language variants in those circumstances. In addition, social networks, as spotted in the response of participant A are assumed to influence attitudes in using a language. In a multilingual country, Chambers (2007) mentions an ethnic enclave, which deals with the attunement of a language. For instance, people who belong to a certain group, in this case, can be referred to as an enclave, have to work outside their community. This means concerning language, and they will eventually accommodate their language. Therefore, participant A's adjustment in first-person pronoun use is not simply her subjective presentation of self-image. Instead, they follow a close intersubjective alignment with their co-participants. Similarly, Participant B wishes to present herself as more approachable to local Jakartan by using gue. Furthermore, she feels the urge to use gue as her surroundings routinely exchange using this pronoun. In addition, the use of gue is also can be implied as to the shifting process of speakers attempting to put less focus on themselves and adjusting to the way their Jakartan friend speaks. This kind of response could be referred to in the study by Manns (2012) that concerning first-person pronouns. A few participants selected gue to enact stances that may be examined in terms of both self-categorization and indirect indexicality. Firstly, these participants wish to assert personal identity beyond the opportunity provided by self-categorization. The different contexts of using this pronoun could also be implied as a capacity of the participants to communicate across social groups. Another thing to discuss is that both participants are reluctant to use gue when speaking to friends who share similar ethnic backgrounds. It can be inferred that there is an attempt to preserve identity.

Social Comparison
Social comparisons explain individuals' behavior to establish distinctiveness between one's own and other groups for evaluative purposes to provide order, meaning, and social identity (Tajfel, 1974). Individuals must first have acquired a sense of belonging to a distinct group from the one they dislike (Tajfel, 1974). As social comparison looks for a comparing act of individuals belonging to two different groups, there is no specific and relevant finding that could be placed in this core cognitive aspect. Instead of comparing two groups, the participants do self-comparison evaluating the effects they obtained when using and when not using gue in different social environments. The evaluation includes emotional significance such as self-esteem, the reaction from the addressee (could be positive or negative), and changes in the atmosphere of conversation. According to the data collection, there is no sign of comparison among groups stated by both participants A and participant B. The only comparison refers to the effect of self without attempting to compare two groups she interacted with, especially in terms of perceiving one group to have a higher position or highly valued compared to the other group. However, it is found that comparison exists in the initial group members to which the participants belong. As part of the finding, Participant A mentions that her group members, mostly Javanese, constrain the use of gue. The group members argue that gue is not appropriate and is not supposedly used and as it is contradictory with what they usually have (to talk using Aku). The contrast perception of gue by local Jakartan and non-Jakartan has made participant A take a careful step to use it, especially to her friends from outside Jakarta who perceive gue as impolite. The way friends of participant A perceive gue can be implied as to the process of avoidance as they believe that there are significant differences between the speakers from other regions from theirs. It is proven by Djenar (2012) research, which implied that non-Jakartans often consider gue to be coarse and overly familiar. They tend to characterize speakers who are not from Jakarta but use gue as arrogant. Another explanation is because gue is an explicitly out-group language feature and is not considered acceptable within the local environment (Manns, 2012). In addition, young people tend to have a strong aversion or sense of dislike to this pronoun as mentioned by Djenar (2017). Smith-Hefner (2007) also mentions that even though gue has positive value and is perceived to have a cool, cosmopolitan sense, this language is assumed to be dual-faceted. It is not only used to refer to social styles identified as cool and trendy but can also reference negative sociability such as being too familiar and rude. Similar findings were found from the responses of participant B. By using gue, Participant B spots a different attitude of her Jakartan friend where they will be more open and blunt in a positive way to build a closer relationship. Conversely, the positive attitude does not apply to the friends of participant B. For them, there is nothing wrong with the pronoun gue as it is the local language and part of the culture in Jakarta. Further, they argue that since gue is exclusively associated with the life of people living in the capital, it is not appropriate for those from outside the area, Jakarta, to use this pronoun. They label those who use gue as 'pretentious' or soksokan. This response aligns with the finding in Djenar et al.'s (2018) study, in which one of the participants states that gue is not appropriate. The speakers of this pronoun are considered arrogant and unable to integrate with their friends. Hence, they will be pointed out and asked to switch the pronoun considering the place they belong to. Thus, it could be inferred that the responses from the friends of participant B are intended to maintain the group boundaries by preferably using what they believe is standard language Aku instead of Gua. Another explanation in which refusal on the use of gue occurs in the group members of participants, Djenar et al. (2017) called this an othering process. It is a process by which individuals are represented as different from creating an ingroup and outgroup boundary. It is examined how people perceive the collective style of speakers from another region as being significantly different from the style of speakers from their region. A similar case of avoidance and othering was found in the study conducted by Manns (2011) in Malang, East Java. One of the participants mentions that people who use gue seem to identify themselves as someone else. In addition, another participant explains that this is because gue is an explicitly out-group language feature and not considered acceptable within the local Javanese environment. The most frequent reason uttered by participants in using the first single personal pronoun gue is to align or conform with the surrounding. If it is seen from the concept of stance defined in the theoretical framework, such response is an attunement process to help them determine their sense and position in society. Drawn from the interview responses, several stances are generated due to pronoun gue, which are familiarity, intimacy, and close relationship.

CONCLUSION
This research aims to find out the participants' underlying motivations for their usage of the first single personal pronoun, gue, and how it is related to the identity construction seen from the perspective of Social identity Theory (SIT). First, to conclude, participants of the study who are Non-Jakartans use gue in their conversation. Second, through the use of this pronoun, it was found that the participants undergo the process of social categorization and social identification. Yet, the social comparison was absent as none showed responses comparing the two groups. Third, due to social categorization and social identification, participants can enact stances, mostly familiarity and 'coolness' which becomes a prime aspect for them to construct self-identity. This study adds to the literature by studying personal pronouns, allowing linguists to grasp better how social structures are formed and how language contributes to the speakers' identity building as a medium of social interaction. Second, this research aims to pique students' curiosity who want to learn more about pronominal variation by revealing what has to be explored further to produce thorough results. As there is no sufficient evidence that the participants commit or show an act of social comparison, in-depth observations through designated events to see whether an act of social comparison occurs in a certain social event can be meaningful research in the future.