Examining “We” and Modality as Ideological Practice in Opening Speeches of Asian-African Conference: A Critical Discourse Analysis

This article examined the practice of solidarity’s ideology as reflected through the pronoun “we” and its collocated modal expressions in the opening speeches of the 1955 Asian-African Conference. Adopting a descriptive-qualitative approach, the study was grounded in Fairclough’s model of Critical Discourse Analysis with particular emphasis on the textual dimension: word meaning, coherence and cohesion, modality, and deixis. AntConc software was employed to construct a specialized corpus and to generate word lists, node words, collocations, and concordances. These approaches facilitated the investigation into how the pronoun “we” represented a unified collective identity of Asian and African nations, and how modality contributed to articulating ideological commitments. The research corpus consisted of 27 digitized texts of the opening speeches sourced from the official Verbatim Reports of the Asian-African Conference Plenary Sessions published by the Conference Secretariat in 1955. The findings demonstrated that the collocation of “we” with modal verbs (must, can, should, shall, and will) illustrates how language was strategically employed, not merely to convey propositions but also to enact ideological positions, mobilize regional solidarity, and articulate a transnational commitment to decolonization and global peace