Register Variation in Political News of The Jakarta Post Website: A Corpus-Based Systemic Functional Linguistics Analysis
Abstract
The Jakarta Post, Indonesia's principal English-language newspaper, covered a politically turbulent first year of President Prabowo Subianto's administration in 2025, marked by military expansion into civilian governance, widespread civil unrest, and executive consolidation. This study examines whether The Jakarta Post's political coverage exhibits a stable register despite this volatility. Applying a corpus-based Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) framework, the study analyzes 100 political news articles from The Jakarta Post Politics section published in 2025, drawing on Halliday and Hasan's (1989) register theory of field, tenor, and mode and Jakobson's (1960) theory of language functions. The corpus of 68,645 tokens was analyzed using AntConc 4.3.1, with the BNC Baby news subcorpus as the reference corpus. The analysis identifies a stable formal institutional register, characterized by state apparatus field vocabulary, distanced journalistic tenor, and closed formal mode marked by nominalization and high lexical density. This register consistently aligns with the referential function, indicating that politically contested events are typically presented within an institutional, fact-oriented frame rather than an evaluative one. The findings provide corpus-based evidence for the applicability of SFL register theory to non-Western English-language news media and offer a replicable methodology for future register analyses of political discourse in Southeast Asian institutional journalism.
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