Globalization and Language Hegemony

Abstract

In view of the cultural aspect, the national identity of Indonesia is the manifestation of cultural values that develop in all aspects of life with unique characteristics differentiating Indonesia from other countries. As a pluralistic country, Indonesia has 34 provinces with more than 16.000 islands of varied cultures. All of which have the power to integrate or disintegrate Indonesia’s national unity. Inevitably, the world is changing in a process of globalization toward creating a new borderless big village with consequences 1) less government power; 2) liberalism; 3) free market economy; 4) western culture hegemony; and many others. Globalization is deemed catastrophic toward Indonesian traditional values. This paper argues that globalization, on the contrary, brings the opportunity to see the reality of language use in that between English and Indonesian pragmatic apology utterances, both expressive speech acts show similarity in apology features. This paper wants to see whether globalization affects local identity in the context of language use. This paper analyzed apology utterances in Friends TV Series as western representation and utterances found in Office Boy TV Series as Indonesian representation. It is a descriptive qualitative study with content analysis adopted from Spradley in Santoso (2017). The finding shows that apology utterances both English and Indonesian realized universal features of apology that is IFID, Responsibility, Explanation, Repair, Forbearance, Addressed, Phatic, and Interjection. In conclusion, there is no language hegemony. If one considers similarities rather than differences, one will get a deeper insight into languages that will broaden one’s view of language.