language shift and vitality of paku language in east barito

Paku language gets shifted in connection to fading its language vitality away. the decreasingnumber of native speakers of paku language has probably resulted from language contact with othersurrounding languages. as a consequence, the natives gradually become bilingual, even multilingual.some dominant languages around the speech area of paku language include dayak maanyan, banjar, andindonesian languages. regarding economic factors, the natives interact with others who use otherlanguages. hence, the paku tribe shifts to use dayak maanyan language for daily interaction since dayakmaanyan language is categorized as the lingua franca along the barito river. both paku and dayakmanyaan languages are lexically similar. besides, dayak maanyan and paku languages are included as alanguage family. as a result, the natives of paku language have no difficulties to become bilinguals byspeaking both paku and dayak maanyan languages. unfortunately, this tends to make the nativesuninterested in using the paku language. these are also considered as an initial step of the current loss ofpaku language vitality in east barito regency. this study focuses on language shift in terms of its usageand language vitality level of paku language. it deployed a descriptive method. the data were obtainedfrom informants in the speech event happening in some domains of language use in bantai napusubdistrict. the data were then analyzed by some steps, that are (1) classifying paku language usedconcerning its domain, (2) identifying language shifts on paku language usage, (3) measuring pakulanguage vitality level with using unesco and egids scales, and (4) concluding.