Nurenzia Yannuar is the newest Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics from Leiden University, The Netherlands. She completed her PhD at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) in October 2019. Her research promotes a local linguistic practice in Malang. It discusses the structure and development of Bòsò Walikan Malangan (‘Malang-style reversal language’). Known as Walikan, it incorporates reversed words originating from Malangan Javanese, Malangan Indonesian, and other languages into a Malangan Javanese structure.

Nurenzia’s doctoral research also discusses Walikan in relation to other youth languages, explores its development from the 1940s up to now, describes the phonotactics of Malangan Javanese and Walikan, demonstrates how the reversed forms used by different groups of speakers are dynamic and changing, and shows that Walikan enjoys on-going popularity in different types of media. If you would like to read more, the published monograph can be downloaded for free at https://www.lotpublications.nl/boso-walikan-malangan-struct…

Source and photo credit: Department of English, Universitas Negeri Malang facebook page @englishfsum