The correspondence between speech levels and (In)directness in Javanese: Evidence from request strategies

In many languages, politeness is conveyed primarily through pragmatic strategies such as (in)directness. Javanese, however, also encodes politeness through stratified speech levels, notably krama (high level), madya (middle level), and ngoko (low level). In languages with a stratified speech-level system, such as Javanese, speakers cannot simply attend to (in)directness while disregarding speech-level choice, or conversely, attend only to speech-level choice without considering degrees of (in)directness. Both dimensions must be taken into account, as politeness is negotiated through the correspondence between speech-level choice and degrees of (in)directness. This study investigates the correspondence between speech levels and (in)directness in the negotiation of politeness in Javanese. Requests were selected as the testing ground, with data elicited through a Discourse Completion Task administered to 40 native speakers and analysed qualitatively. The findings show a tendency towards parallel correspondence between speech level choice and request (in)directness: speakers using krama typically employed indirect strategies, whereas those using ngoko favoured direct strategies. In cases where this pattern did not hold, sociopragmatic or contextual factors influenced speakers’ choices. These findings suggest that politeness theories need to account for languages in which speech levels systematically co-occur with (in)directness.