On Political Language Ideology: Critical View of Indonesian President Speech David Samuel Latupeirissa Department of English Literature, STIBA Kupang, Kupang-NTT, Indonesia I Ketut Darma Laksana Department of Linguistics, Universitas Udayana, Denpasar, Indonesia Ketut Artawa Department of Linguistics, Universitas Udayana, Denpasar, Indonesia I Gusti Ayu Gde Sosiowati Department of Linguistics, Universitas Udayana, Denpasar, Indonesia Abstract—The current research aimed to explore the political language of Indonesia’s first president, Soekarno. The exploration was conducted to reveal the ideology behind Soekarno’s political language. The research was focused on inspecting the language form and ideology of the language. The researchers have applied the three dimensions of analysis of the Critical Discourse Analysis theory proposed by Fairclough. The projection of language form was inspected through the analysis of the first level, while the projection of ideology was inspected through the analysis of the second level. Following that, an analysis of the third level was conducted to indicate social-political change in Indonesia as an impact of Soekarno’s political language. The findings have drawn conclusion about the three main ideologies of Soekarno that have shaped nation of Indonesia. They are ‘unity as the most important value’, revolution as the soul of Indonesian’ and, ‘imperialism as the main enemy’. Index Terms—critical discourse analysis, Fairclough's three-dimension analysis, political language, ideology I. INTRODUCTION Political language has played important roles in human civilization as the language of politics, philosophically, has existed since the beginning of the human civilization era (Cobley, 2009, p.40). Coulthard (2014) states that it has been used as a tool for performing meaning to uncover entities (p. 204). Furthermore, it has been a medium in the world (Thompson, 2005, p.5) that constructs social life (Hymes, 2005), as well as ideology (Marlina and Shakila, 2016). Based on that theoretical understanding fact, this study explores the phenomenon of how political language shapes ideology in a nation. The construction can be a means of preserving or destroying the nation. It preserves a nation when politicians use language to create positive ideology that is needed by the nation itself. By way of contrast, it destroys a nation when politicians use language as a means of grabbing power and authority for themselves without considering whether there is truth and reality in their words. Some experts in Critical Discourse Analysis assert that most politicians use language to grab power without considering truth and reality of their words. In Indonesia, where this study has been conducted, political language is viewed as a means to cheat people. We believe that this phenomenon has occurred not only in Indonesia as an Asian country, but also in America, Europe, and African countries. In order to examine these phenomena, the authors have conducted a study on Soekarno’s Political Language (SPL). Soekarno was an Asian nationalist as well as a socialist politician (Yang and Samsudin, 2017) who proclaimed freedom for Indonesians on August, 17 th 1945. He was also the first president of Indonesia. We have chosen SPL in Indonesia because we perceive an erosion of Indonesia’s national ideology, and the political value of Pancasila 1 , has occurred lately. It is our view, this erosion threatens to destroy what was established by the nation founders. At this level, the gap between das sein and das sollen can be viewed clearly. The strength of the national ideology and political values has been, and remains, a noble expectation for Indonesia. Unfortunately, the social phenomena that have happened lately indicate that the political value of Pancasila is getting lower, and being destroyed by other Indonesian politicians, along with the waning of patriotic ideology (cf. Ray, 2017, Bustan, 2012; Yuliono, 2013). Furthermore, the fact that the ‘highest rate of corruption in Indonesia has acted by politicians’ (Tim Penyusun 1 Pancasila is the Indonesia State Ideology which places national unity as its high value. ISSN 1798-4769 Journal of Language Teaching and Research, Vol. 10, No. 4, pp. 843-850, July 2019 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/jltr.1004.23 © 2019 ACADEMY PUBLICATION