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Jafar Lantowa
State University of Gorontalo

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Forms of the Bajo language register in the coastal community of Bajo Village, Tilamuta District Sayama Malabar; Asna Ntelu; Dakia N. Djou; Jafar Lantowa
BAHASTRA Vol. 46 No. 1 (2026): BAHASTRA
Publisher : Universitas Ahmad Dahlan

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This study examines the forms of language registers in the Bajo language as used by the coastal community of Bajo Village, Tilamuta District. While previous studies have primarily focused on language attitudes and contact phenomena, this research addresses a critical gap by analyzing how registers operate as domain-specific systems of meaning that organize knowledge, social roles, and everyday practices. Using a qualitative descriptive approach, data were collected through observation and elicitation of naturally occurring utterances across three key domains: fishing, trade, and education. The findings reveal that Bajo registers extend beyond lexical variation and function as structured semiotic systems embedded in social life. In the fishing domain, registers encode ecological knowledge, procedural labor, and maritime cognition through stable lexical items and morphologically marked verbs. In the trading domain, registers construct economic roles, transactional processes, and material classifications, reflecting both market-based and reciprocal forms of exchange. In the educational domain, registers emerge within a context of institutional bilingualism, where Bajo mediates the transmission of formal knowledge, supports classroom interaction, and localizes educational practices. This study argues that Bajo registers function simultaneously as communicative tools, cognitive frameworks, and cultural archives. Their continued use across multiple domains demonstrates that linguistic vitality is sustained not only through attitudes but through the functional integration of language in economic and institutional practices. By foregrounding the epistemic and social dimensions of register, this study contributes to sociolinguistic scholarship on language maintenance in multilingual coastal communities.
Representations of human-nature relations in Gorontalo oral poetry: An ecocritical perspective Zilfa Achmad Bagtayan; Yunus Dama; Agrariawan Tamsil; Jafar Lantowa
BAHASTRA Vol. 46 No. 2 (2026): BAHASTRA
Publisher : Universitas Ahmad Dahlan

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Gorontalo oral poetry preserves ecological experience through culturally situated, communal, and intergenerational forms of expression. However, previous studies have primarily examined its linguistic structures, social functions, and cultural preservation, leaving its ecological philosophy and oral modes of transmission underexplored. This study explores four Gorontalo oral poems—Lo Huidu, Pa’ia Hungo Lo Poli, Bulalo Lo Limutu, and Ta Ilotuhata Lo Botu Bulota—using a qualitative descriptive approach and an ecocritical framework. Data obtained through audio recording, interviews, observation, transcription, and translation were analyzed thematically and interpretatively. The findings reveal a distinctive practical-relational ecological worldview organized around three interconnected principles. First, ecological continuity depends on everyday practices of restraint, care, cooperation, and collective restoration. Second, human–nature relationships are neither static nor inherently harmonious: nature sustains material and cultural life, but human conduct can also produce degradation, livelihood vulnerability, and environmental loss. Third, environmental experience becomes collective ecological memory through oral-literary features such as repetition, alternating voices, imperative expressions, narrative escalation, and communal address. These features transform planting, environmental degradation, and weather-related danger into memorable guidance that can be performed and transmitted across generations. The study advances ecocritical scholarship by identifying a culturally specific Gorontalo ecological worldview grounded in reciprocity, responsibility, vulnerability, and responsiveness to environmental change. It also contributes to oral-literature studies by demonstrating that oral poetry is not simply a repository of ecological messages but an active cultural process through which communities remember environmental change, evaluate human conduct, and transmit principles for sustaining ecological and cultural life.