| The benefits of English in a globalized world has long been discussed as opening doors for better opportunities and uniting the world with a common language (Jenkins, 2009; Lie, 2017), but few discuss the conflicts that a global language might have when it is a foreign language, such as in the context of Indonesia. The current study investigates a case study of a language-related conflict on Twitter regarding the meme “Gak bisa Bahasa Inggris” by using critical discourse analysis (CDA) on a Twitter thread started by user @resir014 (otherwise known as Resi), seeking to find what can be revealed about Indonesians in discourse conflicts and how discourse conflicts construct the social culture and beliefs of people in the context of speaking English online. Textual analysis was performed on the Twitter thread, extracting 400 publicly available Tweets that include the 7 original Tweets of the thread, 66 replies, 46 replies to those replies, 93 quote retweets, and 194 replies to the quote retweets. The first part of the analysis involved the discourse-historical approach as created by Wodak (2001, 2011) and adapted by Aljarallah (2017). The data were analyzed for their referential/nomination strategies (how the social actors referred to one another), predicational strategies (themes that occurred in the characterization of each other), and intertextuality (reoccurring texts used to support the social actors’ arguments). The second part of the analysis involved the morphogenetic approach, a modification of Fairclough’s (2013) framework by Newman (2020) based on the works of Archer (1995). The data were discussed and analyzed using an interdisciplinary set of perspectives: the speech acts theory by Austin (1962) as expanded upon by Jones (2012), translingualism by (among others) Canagarajah (2007; 2018), and the theory of capital and class distinction by Bourdieu (1991b). The study found that the social actors characterized each other based on the assumptions that they have on their behavior and identities thus creating conflicts. Analysis of the referential/nomination strategies revealed that those who used the meme were characterized as being prideful of not being able to speak English and acting out of an inferiority complex based on the most occurring lexemes of INFERIOR and PRIDE; while those that were against the meme were characterized as pretentious people that used fancy words to project their societal privileges, based on the most occurring lexeme of PRIVILEGE and colloquial word/phrase ‘fafifu’. In analyzing the predicational strategies, it was found that those who used the meme were characterized so because they were perceived as projecting their inferiority complex unto others and acted out of ignorance, while those that were against the meme were characterized as so because they were perceived as projecting their superiority complex unto others and were insensitive to issues of access and education. Additionally, in terms of intertextuality, the issue of access and education also occurred the most as well as how Resi acted uncouthly in creating the thread and how she should have done better. The study also found that the discourse manifested itself in terms of social reality through the Tweets as part of the material, the ideas discussed/languages used through the Tweets as part of the cultural, and the statements made by those ideas and languages as part of the social. The social actors acted within their structures (based how their structures were preconditioned) through practices, and effectively shifted the structure by enacting their agencies, thus constructing social reality. In dealing with future discourse conflicts, the study concluded that change can only be conducted if people are able to come together and form emergent entities that are able to shift social structures; the role of accounts with significant followings (such as social media influencers, among others) need to be considered as an aspect of synchronic emergence (Elder-Vass, 2007) to boost the presence and opinions of smaller accounts for the social good, and more research needs to be done on the issue so that teachers, activists, or everyday people can act and behave with proven scientific basis. Implications are thus made for related fields and future research of the issue. |