Analyzing Language Attitudes: Global English in South Korea
Hyunju Park
Department of Linguistics, UIUC
4PM, Thursday, May 4, 2006
Lucy Ellis Lounge, FLB
The global spread of English drastically changed the language situation in South Korea, one of the East Asian countries which belong to the expanding circle of World Englishes (Kachru 1982,1986,1992). In the current South Korea, English is a crucial motivation for social mobility and a main standard for individual competence. Moreover, the legal matters are being reviewed to enact English as the second official language by several local governments. However, violent oppositions against adoption of English are still frequently found in the public discourses and English is accused of being a destroyer of Korean national identity. All these apparently conflicting attitudes coexist in one language community, creating various discourses around Global English. The global-local dialectic affects South Koreans’ language attitudes, which in turn determine the language policies.
From these social imperatives, this study aims to explore the dynamics of language attitudes toward English and Korean. The present study is designed to investigate Koreans’ overt and covert attitudes toward English and Korean, specifically focusing on the relationship among subcomponents of language attitudes - belief, affect and readiness to action (Baker 1988, 1992). This research explores how these components correspond to or conflict with one another. To investigate Koreans’ attitude toward English and Korean language policies, this present study adopts a language attitude questionnaire and a matched-guised technique to measure attitudes quantitatively. The close inspection of results shows how different language attitudes are entangled in the South Korean linguistic community.
The analyses of the survey and the test present problems and issues in language attitudes survey and gives implications for the future language policies. This study also makes a few suggestions concerning how language attitude research could be implemented to capture the complexity of social psychology.