Covid Kantruem: Functions of Northern Khmers’ Songs Concerning Corona Virus Disease

Abstract

During the spread of Corona virus disease in Thailand, Northern Khmer singers in the southern part of Northeastern Thailand had produced songs concerning the disease and posted them on www.youtube.com from March to May 2020 in order to communicate with their group members. This article aimed at examining these data, comprising of 18 songs, in terms of their functions and the frequency of each. The study revealed that the data presented 5 functions corresponding to the following functions of Thai folksongs proposed by Sukanya Sujachaya (2000): (1.) to entertain, (2.) to educate, (3.) to socially control, (4.) to be social outlet and (5.) to be the folks’ mass media. However, in these data 2nd-5th functions above were highly emphasized. They were, in the descending order of frequency: 3rd, 4th, 5th and 2nd functions, respectively; whereas 1st function was rarely presented. This was probably due to during the spread of this new pandemic which had caused many severe global effects; the Northern Khmer singers might want to use their folk media to seriously communicate about this disease so as to persuade their group members to understand and to collaborate with the government on the disease prevention by strictly following its measures. They also might want to use their folk media, as the social outlet, for their group members who had suffered various effects from the pandemic, instead of using them for mainly entertaining. This research having applied the framework mentioned above on Northern Khmer’s data proved that even though this framework has existed for decades, it has been still proficiently valid for studying non-Tai ethnic Thai citizens’ contemporary literary works. Furthermore, the study of each function’s frequency shed light on the singers’ emphases which implicitly was in relation with their missions for serving both their nation and ethnic group in the time of crisis.