South Korea has long been regarded as a culturally and linguistically homogeneous country. The dominant ideology of linguistic nationalism—one nation, one race, and one language—has inevitably led to essentialised constructions of ‘Koreanness’. This strong sense of Korean linguistic nationalism and identity, which is grounded in the ability to speak standard (Seoul-based) Korean, has posed serious problems, driving discrimination and prejudice. Perceived outsiders of this assumed linguistic homogeneity are often racialised and marginalised. Nevertheless, this homogeneity is more ideological than real, and belies South Korea’s increasingly multiethnic and linguistically diverse population.
Those lacking, or with limited access to, the appropriate linguistic resources in standard Korean have often borne the consequences of the dominant ‘Koreaness’ discourse. Migrants and returning migrants, children with mixed heritage, North Korean refugees, heritage speakers such as second generation overseas Koreans, and people with disabilities, for example, are regularly pathologised for a perceived lack of alignment with standard Korean.
This special issue of Melbourne Asia Review is born out of the need to challenge the ideology of linguistic nationalism by foregrounding the perspectives of the people most negatively affected by it. The accessibility of language resources, or lack thereof, is the key point of focus because it is in this context that South Korean society and national and individual identity intersects with multilingual, multicultural, and diverse people’s participation. But this special issue does not simply critique the dominant ideology of ‘Koreaness’ and the linguistic discrimination and exclusion affecting minoritised groups. The contributions also offer practical suggestions for what can be done to improve access to linguistic resources and therefore how to contribute in a meaningful way to building more positive multicultural identities within Korean society.
The contributions from Daniel Pieper and Adam Zulawnik highlight the linguistic challenges, particularly in terms of identity construction, experienced by North Korean defectors living in South Korean society. Decades of government language policies from contrasting ideologies have increased the differences between the language spoken in the North and in the South. Although the two variants remain mutually intelligible and communication issues may be simply minor, differences of vocabulary and accent mean that North Korean defectors are marked as not ‘South Korean’, resulting in discrimination.
The articles by Jiyoung Kim and Jaran Shin discuss the experiences of marriage migrants and multicultural and multilingual families within South Korean society. The phenomenon of marriage migrants started at the end of the 1990s with a large increase of migrant women, mostly from East Asia and Southeast Asia, who married South Korean men. The life of these women, and their children, have been affected by language barriers. These ‘multicultural families’ continue to experience the negative consequences of trying to assimilate into a Korean monolingual society while trying to maintain and develop their multilingual backgrounds. Unfortunately, opportunities to maximise the benefits of their bilingualism remain scant. Lee Jin Choi and Adrienne Lo show that it is not only migrants and their children who face these language barriers. South Korean speaking children returning to Korea after extended periods studying overseas often to learn English also face considerable difficulties, exacerbated by being perceived as privileged by the wider Korean society.
Accessing appropriate linguistic resources is not a problem only felt by multilingual and multicultural groups in Korea, but also by Koreans living overseas. Sin Ji Jung shows that within Korean migrant communities in Australia there are major obstacles to maintaining Korean language proficiency across generations, particularly for those living in regional and remote areas. Min Jung Jee makes it clear that the lack of educational opportunities designed for second generation Koreans in Australia severely undermines the potential to expand Korean language education for an increasing number of learners of Korean as an additional language.
Learners of Korean as an additional language are confronted with other challenges too. Lucien Brown argues that although university study abroad programs in South Korea present themselves as positive transformational opportunities for students, students may confront negatively racialised experiences.
Finally, in his contribution, Kang Nam-wook provides some important reflections on an often-overlooked group of language learners, such as those with visual impairments, while also outlining guidelines for educators on how to make language learning for this group more inclusive.
The global popularity of Korean popular culture, including K-pop and Korean dramas, has sparked a surge of interest in Korean language and society. This is reflected in an increasing number of international students, migrants, and returnees to South Korea, and in the growing popularity of learning Korean as a heritage or foreign language in diasporic contexts.
In recent times, South Korea has attempted to capitalise on this growing interest in Korean culture via the promotion of an ostensibly multicultural policy. This policy draws directly on the notion of injae (human resources)—highlighting the benefits of bi/multilingualism in an increasing globalised world. That said, the understanding of bilingualism underpinning injae is usually limited to the acquisition of English as an additional language. Often, it does not recognise or value bi/multilingualism in other combinations of languages, as the articles in this special issue highlight in relation to a range of marginalised groups, including marriage migrants and their mixed-heritage children and North Koreans. Even elite bilinguals who have acquired English overseas and returned to South Korea after studying abroad, face prejudice because of the linguistic nationalism prevalent in mainstream South Korean society. Despite the apparent benefits of globalisation, much of the ongoing resistance to, and related pathologising of these various groups rests on South Korea’s ongoing linguistic nationalism— steeped in (and limited to) the notion that standard Seoul-based Korean is the only Korean language variety of merit.
While the policy of injae thus remains largely rhetorical, it nonetheless provides a potential (policy) discourse for the recognition of other languages, and language varieties, such as North Korean, in South Korea’s increasingly diverse society. Such policy discourses can only work meaningfully and effectively if they value all languages and language varieties, rather than differentiating between them in terms of existing linguistic hierarchies. At the same time, the language issues facing linguistically and culturally diverse students in South Korea and in diasporic contexts should be actively addressed in education settings. In this regard, bi/multilingualism and/or bidialectalism in any combination of language varieties should be seen and incorporated into this wider discourse of linguistic diversity as a resource, so that South Koreans can move beyond the strictures and hierarchies of linguistic nationalism that regard Seoul-based Korean (Seoul dialect) as the standard and only prestigious (national) language variety.
Contributing Editors: Dr Nicola Fraschini and Dr Mi Yung Park.
Image: A visual art installation in Seoul, October 2024. Used with permission from Nicola Fraschini.