Constructing intercultural understanding through speech acts in YouTube podcast discourse

This study examines illocutionary speech acts in an intercultural YouTube podcast interaction between Raditya Dika and Jae Park. While previous studies have extensively classified speech acts in digital discourse, limited attention has been given to how they function as resources for negotiating intercultural perspectives in podcast interactions. Using a qualitative descriptive design, this study analyzed one purposively selected podcast episode based on Searle’s taxonomy of five illocutionary acts: representatives, directives, expressives, commissives, and declaratives. The data comprised 570 coded units produced by the two main participants, excluding 70 minimal responses or backchannel-like items without identifiable illocutionary functions. Representatives were dominant (372 units; 65.26%), followed by directives (105; 18.42%), expressives (85; 14.91%), and commissives (8; 1.40%); no declaratives were identified. Contextual analysis indicates that speech acts function sequentially to present personal and cultural perspectives, seek clarification, negotiate differences, and maintain interpersonal alignment. Rather than directly demonstrating intercultural understanding or culturally preferred communicative behaviour, the findings show how speech acts create interactional opportunities for cultural differences to become discussable and negotiable. The study is limited to a single episode and single-researcher coding, highlighting the need for broader datasets and systematic inter-rater reliability procedures in future research.