Constructing identity in political discourse: A sociolinguistic analysis of Aung San Suu Kyi’s interview on the Rohingya Crisis

ABSTRACT

Every human being has a personal identity, which is explicitly related to oneself as an individual, but at the same time, one has a series of group identities. Therefore, as postmodernists have stated, identity is far more complex and negotiated at the individual level. I proposed to examine how the identity reflected in Aung San Suu Kyi's interview utterances represents her political ideology regarding the Rohingya conflict. This study aims to analyze Aung San Suu Kyi's identity as reflected in her interview on the Rohingya crisis.
I gained the data from the Aung San Suu Kyi video interview with Asian News International. I used Omoniyi's (2006) theory of sociolinguistics and identity to identify Aung San Suu Kyi's identity. Moreover, this study applied Omoniyi's (2010) hierarchical conceptual framework of identities to count and establish the numerical order of several identities foregrounded in the interview. As Norton (2010) notes, the qualitative method employed in this study is often used in identity research.
From this study, I revealed that Aung San Suu Kyi represents Myanmar to the world as a nation with a stance to solve its problems, especially the Rohingya crisis. Although she cannot guarantee when this problem will be resolved, she remains optimistic about resolving the issue of the Rakhine people. She is very confident that the system that has been created in Myanmar can reduce crime, which can worsen the atmosphere between Myanmar and the Rakhine people.
Further, this writer expects the next researcher to conduct studies on Aung San Suu Kyi and the Rohingya crisis in the same field of language and identity, and their relation to other aspects of personal life beyond political ideology, for instance, cultural background, national identity, or gender identity. A comparative study may be conducted using other languages and subjects to broaden the research.