Identifying Linguistic and Speech Acts Variations of the Buginese Tribe Through Socio-Pragmatic Analysis in Establishing Daily Discourse Interactions

Abstract

Buginese is a local language in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, which is spoken in almost 60% of Sulawesi Island. This study aimed to explore the selection of linguistic variations and language acts as a linguistic model used by ethnic Buginese in establishing discourses of everyday socio-pragmatic interactions. It relied on a qualitative design to obtain the linguistic corpus that occurs empirically and naturally in communication interactions. This study used the snowball method by combining ethnographic strategies. The instrument used the Speaking Involvement Technique, in which the researchers were directly involved in people’s interactions by paying attention to communicating situations, recording data, and conducting interviews for data validation purposes. All data or corpus of linguistic variations and speech acts collected were analyzed by the speaking strategy componential technique strategy developed by Dell Hymes. This study successfully discovers a model for identifying the Buginese ethnicity's linguistic variations and speech acts to build a discourse of communication interactions. The expressions of selection of linguistic variations and speech acts are dominantly based on polite sentence constructions and formulations, and ethically according to the local culture of Buginese ethnicity, namely the culture of siri. The results of this study can affect the enrichment of scientific information, which functions and acts as a meaningful reference in the field of linguistic studies, especially examining speech act variation in the expression of conversational discourse, in addition to being a foundation in the development of local content material and multicultural understanding.