SAYING THANKS IN BUTON CULTURE: GENDERED GRATITUDE STRATEGIES AMONG BUTONESE YOUTH ACROSS SOCIAL RELATIONS

Abstrak

This paper reports a sociopragmatic study of how Butonese young adults realize gratitude in Baubau City, with a focus on gendered patterns across social relations characterized by power, distance, and kinship. Although thanking is often treated as a routine politeness act, its realizations can vary systematically depending on relational configuration and cultural expectations. The study aims (1) to describe how strategy distributions pattern across deference, solidarity, and hierarchical relations (including speaking-up and speaking-down orientations) within kinship and non-kinship contexts, and (2) to identify differences in gratitude strategy realizations produced by male and female Butonese young adults across varied social relations. Data were collected in January-February 2026 using an open-ended written Discourse Completion Task (DCT) with a split-set design, in which participants wrote the utterances they would produce in each scenario. Forty Butonese young adults residing in Baubau participated (20 male; 20 female), with two DCT versions (A and B) administered (20 participants per version; 10 male and 10 female). The scenarios collectively operationalized eight fixed social-relation conditions derived from power, distance, and kinship configurations, with hierarchical relations split into speaking-up and speaking-down contexts to support scenario distribution. All responses were coded using Cheng’s (2005) eight-category taxonomy of thanking strategies, and descriptive counts and percentages were used to summarize distributions by social-relation condition and speaker gender; a supporting metric (average number of strategies per response) was calculated to indicate response elaboration. Results show that explicit thanking was near-universal across the dataset (479/480 responses; 99.8%) and that address/attention-getting devices occurred at high rates overall (85.4%), while other strategies appeared more selectively (positive feeling 28.5%, other 16.9%, apology 9.0%, repayment 5.2%, recognition of imposition 4.4%, appreciation 2.1%). Strategy use also varied across social-relation conditions, with the widest fluctuation observed for address/attention-getting devices (63.3%-100%), and average strategies per response ranging from 2.15 to 2.77. Gender differences were generally modest, but females showed higher use of “other” moves (20.8% vs. 12.9%), whereas males showed higher recognition of imposition (7.5% vs. 1.3%). Overall, the findings indicate that Butonese young adults’ gratitude realizations are anchored by stable core routines yet remain sensitive to relational configuration, with supportive moves contributing to multi-strategy gratitude events across contexts.