<![CDATA[This article aims to find out how gendered language practices in Bugis society are produced, negotiated, and transformed through everyday communication. Moving beyond deficit or binary difference accounts of gendered speech, the study conceptualizes gender as an interactional and relational accomplishment mediated by social status, age, politeness norms, institutional setting, and language choice. The research uses a qualitative sociolinguistic design based on participatory observation, recorded natural conversations, interviews, and field notes involving Bugis community members and local social actors in Laringgi Village. Data were coded thematically with NVivo 12 Plus and interpreted through sociolinguistic theories of indexicality, relational politeness, communities of practice, and Bugis cultural scholarship. The findings show that men and women do not differ linguistically in a fixed or essential manner. Rather, gendered communication is organized through intersecting norms of directness, deference, seniority, authority, and situational formality. Polite Bugis pronouns and clitics such as idi', -ki', and ta-/i- index respect and social distance, whereas iko, -ko, and nu-/mu- tend to signal informality, intimacy, or lower deference. However, gender is often overridden by status and age: educated and institutionally positioned women can speak authoritatively to men, while younger men remain obliged to address older women politely. The study contributes to language and gender research by showing that Bugis gendered speech is best understood as relationally calibrated social practice, not as a simple male-female contrast.]]>
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