Hiring-Hiring Komering di Facebook: Analisis Bentuk, Tema, dan Potensinya bagi Pemertahanan Bahasa

Abstract

This study analyzes the structural forms, themes, and potential for language preservation in 45 “hiring-hiring” texts traditional Komering-language call-and-response pantuns collected from three Komering community Facebook groups in March 2023. These texts were originally posted by community members around 2020, during the period of social restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Studies of Komering oral literature have so far relied on conventional field data and focused on measuring the vitality of the genre, while its circulation in digital spaces has not yet been linguistically examined. This study employs a qualitative approach using a netnographic strategy based on Kozinets’ (2015) framework, as well as triangulation involving three native speakers of the Komering language. The results show that digital “hiring-hiring” preserves conventional pantun patterns with consistent morphosyntactic markers of the Komering dialect, is dominated by themes of romance (29 data points, 64.4%), and demonstrates active production of new verses rather than mere reproduction of old ones. However, without longitudinal and demographic data, these findings are insufficient to prove language preservation in the full sociolinguistic sense; the data are more accurately interpreted as an indication of the digital space’s potential as an additional domain for the production of traditional oral genres. This study makes a methodological contribution through the application of structured netnography in the study of Indonesian regional oral literature, as well as an analytical framework that clearly distinguishes between genre vitality and language preservation