Power or Humble: Personal Pronouns Usage in Indonesian President’s Speech

Abstract

Delivering a speech in the English language has its own difficulties, especially for a non-native English speaker. The most challenging aspect for a non-native English speaker in delivering an English speech is that the speech delivery process may suffer a negative language transfer because of the differences between the speaker’s official language and English grammatical features. This article aimed to explore the personal pronoun usage of the Indonesian President in the 2014 APEC CEO Summit speech. This qualitative research was done by adopting Fairclough (2013)’s discourse analysis pattern. The findings showed that the most frequent personal pronoun that the President used is “we” and “our”. The use of these two indicates that he speaks on behalf of his country, and he has a sense of solidarity with the citizen. Regarding the personal pronoun, his speech only has minor ineffective usage, so it can be concluded that the usage is generally effective. However, we also found that the speech quality can be judged from many aspects, such as the sentence structure, the vocabulary, and the speech delivery method. Every strategy in doing formal speech has its advantages and disadvantages.