About Me

Hai, I am Nor Ismah, a Masters student of Asian Studies Department at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. I was born in Pekalongan, a district in Central Java, Indonesia that is also known as Batik city. But now I live in Yogyakarta, a province in Indonesia where you can find Borobudur temple and Merapi mountain. Javanese is my mother tongue and I use it daily with my family and other people in my home town. Both in Pekalongan and Yogyakarta I speak Javanese but they have some slight differences in words and dialects. I also speak Bahasa Indonesia for official and commercial purposes.

I am involved in documentation project to document not only my language, but by doing this I am also helping to converse about my culture. For example, there are some traditional games using Javanese song played by children. When I was small, I used to play traditional games with my friends, but now I have forgotten the games in detail, even our current generation do not play it anymore. So, I also want to keep record of those traditional games to preserve them as our cultural possessions.

If you have any comments or feedback, please email me at ismakazee@yahoo.com.

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