Javanese commonly describe their “mixed” bilingual Javanese-Indonesian usage as bahasa gadho-gadho, a phrase fairly translated as “language salad” or, following Buchori (1994), “hybrid language.” It combines Indonesian bahasa “language” (cf. Javanese básá) with Javanese gadhogadho (now, effectively, an Indonesian borrowing) which refers to a dish of lightly cooked or raw vegetables, mixed together on a plate and covered with peanut sauce. As a humorous, dismissive, or pejorative alternative to “mixed language” (I: bahasa campuran), bahasa gadhogadho recalls labels which have been coined for bilingual usage in other communities, as well as “word salad,” a linguists' designation for randomly mixed, ill-formed, and unpatterned combinations of grammatical and lexical material.

The hallmark of bahasa gadho-gadho is inclusion of lexical material from one language (usually Indonesian) in use of the other, either in grammatically assimilated forms which I discuss in this chapter's latter part, or more extensive code switchings which I sketch in chapter 10. But “mixed” lexical usage is not the only distinguishing mark of such “mixed” Javanese-Indonesian speech. A range of common accentual and grammatical reflexes of Javanese native speakership in Indonesian usage can fairly be called “contact phenomena, “insofar as they are distinctive of Javanese dialects of Indonesian. But their social signifycances need to be considered with an eye to Indonesian's un-native character, which makes them interactionally negligible as diacritics of speakers' ethnicities.