Linguistic variations in Pendalungan traditional wedding ceremonies: A sociolinguistic teaching resource for higher education

The Pendalungan community emerged as a result of cultural acculturation occurring in regions distant from the centers of traditional Javanese culture, producing a unique blend of linguistic, ritualistic, and cultural practices. This distinctiveness is particularly evident in traditional wedding ceremonies, where differences in language use, symbolic expression, materials, and ritual sequences reveal the complex interplay of Javanese and Madurese cultural influences. Such complexity offers a rich foundation for sociolinguistic inquiry, particularly concerning colloquialism, substratum influence, and perceptions of linguistic inferiority. This study employs a qualitative method with an ethnographic strategy and an ethnolinguistic sub-approach to investigate the variation of terminology used in Pendalungan traditional weddings and to assess their pedagogical relevance for sociolinguistic instruction in higher education. Data were obtained through in-depth interviews with Dalang Manten (wedding narrators), supplemented by documentation, reference books, scholarly articles, and field notes. The data were analyzed using Spradley’s ethnographic framework, encompassing domain, taxonomic, componential, and thematic analysis. The findings reveal the extensive use of multilingual terms derived from Indonesian, Madurese, and Javanese, demonstrating a localized multilingual variety that constructs a distinctive Pendalungan linguistic identity. While many ritual practices reflect the adoption of Javanese wedding customs, the incorporation of new lexical items, expressions, and symbolic forms highlights the community’s adaptive creativity rather than cultural decline. The study concludes that the linguistic and cultural variations observed in Pendalungan weddings exemplify a dynamic process of cultural borrowing and language contact that continuously reshapes communal identity. Consequently, these findings hold significant pedagogical value for university-level sociolinguistics, particularly in teaching topics such as language variation, contact, and identity formation within multilingual societies.