Honorific Rules For Alternation Of Kinship Greetings Of The Taba Language In North Maluku, Indonesia

Abstract

The greetings and pronouns in the Taba language (BT) kinship system are inseparable from cultural contexts and social backgrounds, such as position, age, and title. This study aims to analyze and explain the patterns of honorific and non-honorific greeting alternation forms in the Taba kinship system. Data was taken from utterances and sentences containing family greetings and honorary pronouns through observations and records of the people of East Makean Island, South Halmahera. Furthermore, this study used the power and solidarity theory [7] to describe the form and patterns of the greeting alternations [13] in the language. The results showed that there were two forms of alternative greetings in the realm of BT kinship, which were salutations for honorifics and non-honorifics. Honorific greetings in the BT kinship system were explained by the use of Vos, which were described as greeting + hajj title+ personal name + KGPJ.H. Conversely, the non-honorifics were explained by the Tu form, which was described as greeting or personal name + KGPJ.nH. Additionally, the determining factors in selecting the alternation of the BT kinship system were determined by the speaker and speech partner relationship, as well as the greeting characteristics. Based on these determinants, four alternative greeting patterns were discovered in the Taba language. The first two types were BT honorifics with Vos, in which the first was used when the speech partner or the greeted person had a higher position than the greeter, while the second was used when both parties had the same high position. The other two patterns employed the Tu form, where one was used if the speaker or greeters had a higher position than the speech partner, while the last was used when both the parties had low positions in the kinship system.