Tuturan

Tuturan is a term used in Indonesian and Malay linguistics to denote speech, utterance, or the way language is spoken. It refers to the realized aspects of language in spoken form, including pronunciation, intonation, rhythm, and other prosodic features. The word comes from tutur, meaning to speak, with the suffix -an forming a noun that indicates the act or product of speaking.

In academic and educational contexts, tuturan is contrasted with tulis-tulisan (writing). It is used to analyze how speech varies across regions, social groups, and situations, such as tuturan daerah (regional speech) or tuturan baku (standard pronunciation). It also appears in discussions of language development, oral proficiency, and speech pathology, where the focus is on how individuals articulate sounds and use intonation.

Because tuturan is tied to spoken language, it is closely related to fields such as phonology, phonetics, sociolinguistics, and language pedagogy. It can describe formal versus informal speech, style shifting, and the pronunciation of vowels and consonants according to context. While widely used in Indonesia and Malaysia, the term may carry slightly different connotations in different dialect communities.

See also: speech, pronunciation, phonology, sociolinguistics, language education.