The Perception of Kinship Terms in a Malaysian Politician’s Open Letter
Classical Malay kinship terms are a feature of modern Malaysian political discourse (Omar, 2020). In parliamentary proceedings, they are employed by both male and female politicians as a mark of respect or affection, as well as to convey mockery or denigration. This study investigates the perception of these terms as used in a politician’s open letter. Originally published on Facebook, the letter’s contents quickly spread to other media due to what many readers considered its provocative use of kinship terms. Several days of nationwide speculation followed the letter’s ‘going viral’, and this only subsided once a public Twitter response that firmly shut down the dialogue was posted. This analysis will view the controversy through the lens of the male writer and his purported female addressee by comparing their different perceptions of the kinship terms. The findings will be supplemented by how the wider audience of the letter interpreted the same terms. This paper explains the disparity in opinion using a critical discourse studies (CDS) framework (Wodak & Meyer, 2016) which analyses ideological beliefs underlying power relations; beliefs that are made manifest through language. Specifically, the discourse-historical approach (DHA) (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016) is employed, where the interlocutors’ perceptions are verified through a recursive, intertextual, multi-source examination of the sociopolitical context surrounding the linguistic terms under study. The letter’s frosty reception might indicate that the public’s knee-jerk interpretation was correct, yet further exploration reveals that there is some basis for the writer to have made use of classical kinship terms as he did. Ultimately, however, arguments that support the female addressee’s viewpoint prevail, based on how the language in this ostensibly well-intentioned open letter harboured darker implications.
References
Omar, K. (2020). Kinship terms in the Malaysian Parliament. In Y. Matsumura, K. Yamazaki & K. Chinami (Eds.), Goyōron kenkyū no kanōsei [Possibilities of pragmatics research] (pp. 293-307). Asahi Press.
Reisigl, M. & Wodak, R. (2016). The discourse-historical approach (DHA). In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of Critical Discourse Studies (3rd ed.), (pp. 23-61). Sage.
Wodak, R. & Meyer, M. (2016). Critical discourse studies: History, agenda, theory and methodology. In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of Critical Discourse Studies (3rd ed.), (pp. 1-22). Sage.