Pragmatic Functions of Insya Allah in Indonesian Speeches

Abstract

Insya Allah has been part of the Indonesian language and culture for a long time. However, there were very few linguistics studies on the use of Insya Allah. This study aimed to analyse the use of Insya Allah in the Indonesian context using the pragmatic approach. A total of 100 utterances spoken by various speakers at various situations were collected. The study focused on identifying the types of speech acts performed by Insya Allah using Searle’s speech act taxonomy (Searle, 1979). At the second stage, the pragmatic functions of Insya Allah were identified using a combination of classifications used by Pishghadam and Kermananshahi (2012), Nazzal (2005), Ibrahim, Shah, and Armia (2013), and Mohamed Ali (2014). The findings showed that Insya Allah was a reliable marker for commissive and expressive speech acts. This study also found two additional pragmatic functions of Insya Allah which have not been identified in previous studies.