Toba Batak umpasa are short ritual utterances performed in weddings, funerals, and other adat ceremonies. While previous studies have treated umpasa primarily as po-etry or oral literature, their ecological patterning and moral function remain underex¬plored. This article examines how ecological lexemes in umpasa represent landscape and organize moral meaning within the Dalihan Na Tolu kinship philosophy. The data consist of 40 umpasa drawn from published and archival sources, analyzed at the clause level using Stibbe’s (2015) ecolinguistic concepts of salience and framing. The findings reveal three consistent patterns: hydro-lexemes (aek ‘water,’ mual ‘spring’) frame continuity and ancestral source; arboreal lexemes (hariara ‘banyan,’ dangka ‘branch’) frame protection and lineage; and agricultural lexemes (eme ‘rice’) frame humility and socially responsible prosperity. Across the corpus, landscape functions not as a decorative background but as a culturally structured repertoire for articulating kinship obligations, respect, and continuity. The article argues that umpasa preserves an ecolinguistic model in which the environment is encoded in ritual language and transformed into a moral orientation for social life. This study contributes to ecolin¬guistics by demonstrating that ecological representation in indigenous ritual discourse constitutes a structured moral repertoire rather than ornamental imagery.

Received 05 May 2026. Revised 10 July 2026. Accepted 19 October 2026. Published online 15 November 2026

Ecolinguistics, Umpasa, Toba Batak, Dalihan Na Tolu, Ritual Speech, Moral Order, Landscape, Ecological Lexemes, Axiological Lexemes,