A Speech Act Analysis of Sudeep Nagarkar's It Started With a Friend Request

Abstract This paper analyses Sudeep Nagarkar’s popular romance novel It Started With a Friend Request (2013) through Speech Act Theory by J.L Austin and John Searle. The book is set in the contemporary urban relationship mediated by digital communication platforms and provides a rich corpus for studying how language works not only as description but as action. This paper conducts a close reading of the novel’s dialog, text messages, BBM chats and narrative voice and demonstrates how different speech acts declarations of love, promises, accusations, apologies, threats and rejections are performed by the characters to constitute and transform their relationships. The analysis reveals how digital communication platforms create new contexts for performative utterances, how the narrative structure employs performative language to construct intimacy and conflict, and how speech acts serve as the primary mechanism for relationship formation, maintenance, and dissolution in the novel. The paper argues that Nagarkar's novel, despite its popular fiction status, offers significant insights into the performative nature of contemporary romantic discourse in digitally mediated spaces.