Exploring Sentani Folktales of Papua as Media to Teach Local Language for Children

Abstract

 Sentani language in Papua Province is one of the world's many languages that almost extinct. It is also rich with folktales that were regularly passed down in the past from parents/grandparents to children/grandchildren with the purpose of transferring knowledge and moral values. However, only people who live in remote islands of Lake Sentani can speak the language actively while the children use it passively. Accordingly, preservation, especially for children, is deemed necessary to avoid the language from extinction. Recently, the elders in the remote areas told the tales to children irregularly in Indonesian language. The fact that the children like to listen to the tales encouraged the researcher to initiate a study on using folktales as media to teach Sentani language. This is the focus of this study and in particular, the rewriting of the folktales in simple language to be used as materials to teach Sentani language to children. Adopting socio-cultural and ethnolinguistic approaches in the fieldwork conducted from 2016 to 2018 in Jayapura, the study shows two findings. First, children do not speak the language because: (1) Parents do not speak and teach the language at home; (2) They feel that Sentani language is less prestigious than other languages; and (3) They face difficulties in pronunciation, sentence structure, tenses, adposition, and counting system. Second, the folktales help children in learning Sentani language with fun. These findings provide a social, psychological, linguistic, and pedagogical analysis of the preservation of almost extinct languages in a multilingual society.