THE USAGE OF PRONOUNS IN REFERRING TO A PERSON IN KELANTANESE DIALECT THROUGH WHATSAPP APPLICATION

For the people of Kelantan, dialect is a key element in parochialism and this further maintained their strong Kelantanese identity. However, situation in the form of verbal conversation certainly have differences compared to formal conversation found in writings. This study examined the use of personal pronouns in Kelantan dialect in WhatsApp Messenger. WhatsApp is a form of an application that is commonly used in smartphones these days. This form of conversation through social media is selected as the data source because this medium has gained popularity among people in today’s society. A total of 1,060 chats acquired through ‘chat history’ that are later converted into email formats to ensure easy printing process for data collection purposes. To discuss these data, model Grid Speaking (Hymes 1974) will be applied. Based on the studies conducted, researchers have found that pronouns in Kelantanese dialect is unique and varied. The pronouns used also have a place not as pronouns for the first, second and third person. The researchers also found that the use of the first person pronoun is more widely used, for example, more than half of the usage turned out to be all pronouns. The use of the personal pronoun ‘ambo’ is the most frequently used instead of ‘kito’, ‘kawe’, ‘kite’, ‘ambe’, and ‘kambo’. In addition, the spelling of any particular pronoun is not permanent as well as its meaning for example, ‘ore’, ogre , ‘oram’, ‘orng’, ‘kotram’, ‘kokram’ and ‘kore’. This discovery is expected to help researchers understand the variations of pronouns in Kelantanese dialect which is widely used in WhatsApp applications. On the contrary the functions will be different if it used orally for instance ambo, aku, kawe, kito, demo, kami, mu, awok, dio, demo tu dan sdaro.