The Local Construction of a Global Language: Ideologies of English in South Korea 9783110214079, 9783110209631

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Contents
Chapter 1. Unspeakable English? Investigating global English in local context
Chapter 2. The English language in South Korea: History, politics, and sociolinguistics
Chapter 3. Debating English: Language ideologies in the Official English debate
Chapter 4. Playing with English: Language ideologies in Korean-English yumeo
Chapter 5. Representing English: Language ideologies in scripted television entertainment shows
Chapter 6. Disclaiming English: Language ideologies in face-to-face interaction
Chapter 7. Conclusions: Speaking (of) the unspeakable
Backmatter

Citation preview

The Local Construction of a Global Language

≥

Language, Power and Social Process 24

Editor Richard J. Watts

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

The Local Construction of a Global Language Ideologies of English in South Korea by Joseph Sung-Yul Park

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin.

앝 Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines 앪 of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Park, Joseph Sung-Yul. The local construction of a global language : ideologies of English in South Korea / by Joseph Sung-Yul Park. p. cm. ⫺ (Language, power and social process ; 24) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-3-11-020963-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. English language ⫺ Korea (South) 2. Sociolinguistics ⫺ Korea (South) 3. English language ⫺ Study and teaching ⫺ Korea (South) 4. Languages in contact ⫺ Korea (South) 5. English language ⫺ Influence on Korean. 6. English language ⫺ Globalization. I. Title. PE3502.K6P37 2009 420.95195 22 2009003627

ISBN 978-3-11-020963-1 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. 쑔 Copyright 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin. All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover design: Christopher Schneider. Typesetting: PTP-Berlin GmbH, Berlin. Printed in Germany.

For Junghee

Acknowledgements There are many people who offered me help, advice, and suggestions while I was working on this book. I would like to thank Monica Heller and Richard Watts, the editors of this series, and Marcia Schwartz at Mouton for their support. I am especially indebted to Monica Heller, whose careful reading and insightful criticism helped me rethink important questions and clarify issues that I initially overlooked. Her positive attitude and words of encouragement also guided me through the long process of preparing the manuscript. I also thank two anonymous reviewers who kindly pointed out numerous areas that needed improvement. I express my appreciation to Mary Bucholtz, Pat Clancy, Gene Lerner, Mary McGroarty, Sandy Thompson, and Lionel Wee, all of whom provided me with helpful suggestions and encouragement during different stages of the development of this book. I also benefited greatly from the feedback I received from various audiences at several conferences, including the Symposium about Language and Society – Austin (SALSA), Conference on Language, Interaction, and Culture (CLIC), and meetings of the American Anthropological Association, American Association for Applied Linguistics, and International Pragmatics Association, and seminars and workshops at University of California, Santa Barbara, Northern Arizona University, University of Macau, University of Hong Kong, and National University of Singapore. Some of the material in chapter 2 appeared in an earlier article I wrote with Doobo Shim in the Korea Journal (Summer 2008); I thank the journal for permission to adapt sources and ideas from the article. I also thank the speakers who allowed me to record their interaction for the analysis presented in chapter 6. This project would not have been possible without them, and I am deeply grateful for their trust. I can only hope that I have represented their words and lives fairly and justly throughout this book. And thank you to my family, Junghee, Jung In and Jung Wu: with you in my life there is nothing else to wish for. I dedicate this book to Junghee – for being my friend always.

Contents Acknowledgements

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Chapter 1 Unspeakable English? Investigating global English in local context 1. The question of English in South Korea 2. Research on the global spread of English 2.1. The political dimension of research on global English 2.2. The methodological dimension of research on global English 3. Language ideology as a framework of inquiry 3.1. The framework of language ideology 3.2. The global spread of English as a language-ideological issue 3.3. Language ideology and the question of English in Korea 4. The approach: Metalinguistic discourse as focus of analysis 5. Overview: Three ideologies of English in Korea

1 1 5 5 9 13 13 15 18 21 25

Chapter 2 The English language in South Korea: History, politics, and sociolinguistics 1. South Korea as a monolingual society? 1.1. English in the media and popular culture 1.2. The impact of language learning: growing familiarity towards English 2. Korea in pursuit of English: global aspirations and local struggles 2.1. English as a national resource: economic strategies and educational policy 2.2. English as a modern skill: higher education and the job market 2.3. The boom in English language learning 2.4. The politics of ‘English villages’ 2.5. Class, symbolic capital, and language ideology 3. Resistance to English and language purism 4. Conclusion Chapter 3 Debating English: Language ideologies in the Official English debate 1. Language ideological debates in the age of globalization 2. The Official English debate

29 29 30 33 37 37 41 43 46 49 51 55 57 57 61

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Contents

2.1. Bok Geoil and English as an official language 2.2. The debate: development and political context 2.3. The debate: participants and arguments 2.4. The impact of the debate 3. Three ideologies of English in the Official English debate 3.1. Necessitation: English as a necessity 3.2. Externalization: English as language of an Other 3.3. Self-deprecation: Koreans as bad speakers of English 4. Ideological dynamics in the Official English debate 4.1. The three ideologies as an ideological complex 4.2. Framing the debate as politicized opposition 5. Conclusion Chapter 4 Playing with English: Language ideologies in Korean-English yumeo 1. Cross-linguistic humor as metalinguistic discourse 2. Korean-English yumeo as data 3. A typology of Korean-English yumeo 3.1. Translation riddles 3.2. Jokes 3.3. Humorous experiences 3.4. Parody 4. Ideological aspects of Korean-English yumeo 4.1. The theme of Korean-English yumeo 4.2. The target of Korean-English yumeo 4.3. The language of Korean-English yumeo 5. Korean-English yumeo as a site for ideology reproduction 6. Conclusion Chapter 5 Representing English: Language ideologies in scripted television entertainment shows 1. Cross-linguistic humor in media discourse 2. Korean television entertainment shows as data 3. Interpretive resources for the construction of English 3.1. Focusing on Koreans’ inability in English 3.2. Performance of “bad English” 3.3. Presuppositions in the use of subtitles 3.4. Interpretive resources at work: imagining English and Koreanness

61 65 69 72 74 74 77 80 83 83 89 94 96 96 99 102 102 103 104 107 109 110 114 120 125 130

133 133 137 139 140 145 149 154

Contents

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4. Television entertainment shows as metalinguistic discourse 5. Conclusion

162 166

Chapter 6 Disclaiming English: Language ideologies in face-to-face interaction 1. Ideology and interaction 2. Capturing Koreans’ talk about English 3. Interactional practices and ideologies of English 3.1. Interactional practices as resources for ideology reproduction 3.2. Interactional practices in talk about English 3.2.1. Sequence organization 3.2.2. Explicit assessments 3.3. Interactional practices in “expert discourse” 3.4. Contrast with talk about Japanese 4. Two senses of “disclaiming English” in interaction 5. Conclusion

168 168 170 174 174 177 177 184 191 201 211 222

Chapter 7 Conclusions: Speaking (of) the unspeakable 1. Countering unspeakable English: Korea and beyond 2. Implications for further study 2.1. Language ideology and the global spread of English 2.2. English language learning/teaching and language ideology 2.3. Linguistics and globalization studies

224 224 233 233 235 238

Appendix A: Transcription conventions Appendix B: Abbreviations Notes References Subject index Name index

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Chapter 1 Unspeakable English? Investigating global English in local context 1. The question of English in South Korea “Some in South Korea opt for a trim when English trips the tongue,” reads the title of a Los Angeles Times article (Demick 2002). The single-page article reports on how an increasing number of parents in South Korea (henceforth Korea) have their children undergo a form of surgery that snips off a thin band of tissue under the tongue. The majority of the children who undergo this procedure, the article says, have no disability that interferes with their speaking. Most parents pay for this surgery because they believe it will make their children speak English better; the surgery supposedly enables the child to pronounce the English retroflex consonant with ease, a sound that is considered to be particularly difficult for Koreans. Of course, it is clear to any linguist that this belief has no basis; the physical shape of the tongue is not the reason why Koreans do not sound like native speakers of English, as we can see from the large number of Koreans in English-speaking countries who grow up as fluent speakers of the language. Yet, some parents apparently remain unconvinced of this argument, as the article ends with a quotation from one such parent: “At first when I heard about this operation, I was shocked by the idea. But a mother’s ambition for her child is unlimited. You don’t want them to miss any opportunity.” While actual cases of such surgeries do not seem to be very common, reports like this do illustrate how Koreans’ efforts to secure English can often tread the path towards fanatic fetishism. Indeed, in contemporary Korea, English is a language of ultimate importance, a “national religion,” as the writer reports. When one takes the college entrance examination or seeks employment or promotion, English is the single most important area in which he or she must do well in order to succeed. Good English skills are fundamental to a successful life, it is believed, so parents enroll their young children in English language schools or send them to English-speaking countries to give the children’s English a head start. Middle-aged employees of large corporations cannot afford to ignore studying English, either, and spend their precious time after the long workday taking English lessons. Self-help books on how to study English frequently top the bestseller list, as Koreans constantly seek more effective ways of learning the language. On the national level, English figures prominently in Korea’s strategy for survival on the global stage. Issues such as whether English should be given

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Unspeakable English? Investigating global English in local context

official status in order to make Korea more open and competitive in the global market are hotly debated in newspapers and on the airwaves. Korea, then, one might say, is in serious pursuit of English, a near-obsessive quest that is often called the yeongeo yeolpung (‘English frenzy’).1 For some people, this is undeniable evidence that English is an “unspeakable tongue,” a deplorable disease that plagues current Korean society. For them, it is a language that drives Koreans into strange and irrational obsessions which unduly burden every Korean, both emotionally and financially. It fractures Korean society by dividing it into those who have better opportunities for English language learning and those who do not. It holds the whole nation hostage, leading the country into a state of vulgar competition and shallow unproductiveness, and relegating other important issues such as social equity or national identity into secondary status. Ultimately, it is a language that paves the way for Western dominance, gradually driving everyone to admire and desire a foreign culture that is symbolized by English, thus leading to an erosion of Korea’s identity and independence. For those with such beliefs, then, English stands for a state of bondage and inequality, materialistic opportunism, a betrayal of one’s cultural heritage, and a self-abasing longing for American culture. Some say that the reason why English wields such unspeakable power upon Korean society is obvious: it is a consequence of the globalized world, through which English has gained the status of the ultimate global language – as the force of neoliberal economic globalization tightens its grip around the world, English insidiously penetrates every part of the world, instilling a desire towards English into speakers of other languages and thereby incorporating them into a system of power that is centered on the West. Under such a view, Koreans’ obsession over English and its damaging consequences are unsurprising; the global spread of English is so obvious a fact that it would be unusual to find any society unaffected by it. However, the picture is obviously more complex than this. While there can be no doubt about the global power of English, there are also many factors that work against the dominance of English within Korean society, such as relatively stable monolingualism and linguistic homogeneity, strong nationalistic attitudes and a rich heritage of national culture and identity. For this reason, to say that the unspeakable hegemony of English is a natural accompaniment to globalization is overly simplistic, as it does not explain how English comes to claim such status in the context of such multifacted relationships that Koreans hold with the language. The unspeakable power of English in Korea, then, cannot be framed merely as a natural outcome of globalization; in other words, it must be understood as a local, as well as a global, process. What are the local processes that construct English as a language of power in Korean society? In this book, I suggest that the key to this question can be found

The question of English in South Korea

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in another sense of “unspeakableness” of English in Korea: English is viewed as difficult for Koreans to learn and speak, thus a literally un-speakable language. For example, any non-Korean who has taught English to Koreans is familiar with the apologetic “Oh, I can’t speak English well.” This is not something that Koreans say only in the presence of an English-speaking foreigner, but a common thing they say among themselves as well. Neither is this something that is based solely on the stereotypical modesty which Westerners often attribute to East Asians such as Koreans; many Koreans are also quick to point out how other Koreans are as terrible at English as they are. For instance, unsatisfactory negotiations with foreign countries are often blamed on the lack of English skills of Korean diplomats, business people, or government officials. Of course, there are many fluent English speakers among Koreans who carry out political or economic negotiations on behalf of their country; however, a more salient image Koreans have of their own people is usually one of a person who is unable to communicate in English, struggling with fear and embarrassment as he or she tries to avoid having to speak the language. Some parents’ obsessive belief in the efficacy of tongue surgery despite its lack of scientific basis suggests that incompetence in English may even be seen as an inherent physiological trait of Koreans that must be addressed surgically. These two senses of “unspeakableness” are in fact closely related, as the second sense of unspeakableness can be seen as the driving force for the current Korean English frenzy. Individuals’ endless investments in learning English are in part driven by the persistent anxiety that their English is never as good as it needs to be. Also, efforts such as reforms of the national English education curriculum, establishment of “English villages” (large language learning establishments which simulate an English-speaking country, where people can practice interacting with native speakers of English), and jogi yuhak (early overseas education, or sending children to English-speaking countries at early age) are often explicitly framed as a response towards what is considered to be a serious problem in the global age: Koreans’ (perceived) lack of English skills. The main argument of this book is that, in order to understand how English comes to have the hegemonic status it does in Korea, we must understand the connection between these two senses of “unspeakableness” of English. The polysemy of the word serves as a nice illustration of how a language’s social impact is closely related to a language’s social evaluation by individuals, a theme that has been recently emphasized through developments in the study of language ideology (Silverstein 1979, 1985; Schieffelin et al. 1998; Kroskrity 2000; Gal and Woolard 2001; Jaworski et al. 2004). These studies have repeatedly shown that language ideologies are more than naive folk theories of language divorced from real patterns of language use. People’s generalizations and rationalizations

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of patterns in language use can have a real effect on language change, so that, for example, regularization of linguistic patterns may be based on speakers’ belief in the language’s systematicity (Silverstein 1985). More importantly, language ideology can serve as an interpretive filter through which speakers attribute local meaning to macro-social changes so that they may be associated with patterns of language use, facilitating linguistic encoding of identities and group relationships as well as language maintenance or shift (Mertz 1989; Woolard 1998). In other words, it can be argued that, without the socio-cognitive mediation of beliefs about language and their social meaning, large-scale social events cannot have a real impact upon speakers’ linguistic life. In the Korean case, strong beliefs about English and Koreans’ relationship to the language motivate a heavy pursuit of English at all levels of society, thus constructing English as a hegemonic language – in the Gramscian sense that it is actively valorized and adopted even in the absence of any overt act of coercion. The Korean case, then, is helpful in illuminating one particular problem in the study of global English. Various studies have demonstrated that responses to global English are often highly complex and full with tension and contradiction, as desire towards appropriation coexists with resistance towards English, and claims of ownership are juxtaposed with feelings of insecurity. But the question of how such complex local positions translate into the material effects of global English still remains unanswered. That is, while our awareness of the complex responses to English helps us see the problems in simplistically describing the spread of global English as a unilateral process, we still lack a systematic understanding of how such local perspectives interact with constraints of globalization to produce a system of valorization that contributes to the local hegemony of English, thereby constituting the global spread of English. In other words, in order to fully understand the nature of this phenomenon, we must be able to describe the processes by which local speakers come to accept the particular social meaning of English as a hegemonic language in relation to their complex positionality. As Pennycook points out, what is needed is an account of “how English is taken up, how people use English, why people choose to use English” (2001: 62). A closer analysis of how Koreans’ perception of English as an “unspeakable” language mediates the status of English in Korea, then, would provide us with a unique glimpse into the complex socio-cognitive processes that underlie the global spread of English. For this reason, this book aims to investigate how the status of English as a hegemonic language in Korea is constructed within local discourse through the mediation of language ideologies. Adopting the framework of language ideology and its current developments, it argues that English in Korean society is a subject of deep-rooted ambiguities, with multiple and sometimes conflicting ideologies

Research on the global spread of English

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coexisting within a tension-ridden discursive space; and that the complex ways in which these ideologies are reproduced, contested, and negotiated through specific metalinguistic practices across various sites ultimately contribute to a local realization of the global hegemony of English as an international language.

2. Research on the global spread of English Before outlining the theoretical and methodological orientation of this book, I present a discussion of how the phenomenon of the global spread of English has been approached in previous studies. In order to better situate my own approach in the context of prior research, and to concisely present the vast and complex yet loosely defined terrain of the field, I will survey the different approaches to the global spread of English along two intersecting dimensions: the political and the methodological. While I refer to several researchers in the course of this survey, it is not my intention to create a two-dimensional grid upon which one can identify each researcher’s position (many researchers would show up at more than one location on this grid if I were to do so). It is not my point, either, to suggest that these two dimensions are entirely independent of each other. Rather, it is my goal to outline some of the issues that need to be considered when studying the global spread of English from a critical and reflexive standpoint. 2.1. The political dimension of research on global English A wide range of political positions can be found when we look at the literature on the global spread of English. In this section, I present a brief overview of some of the positions that can be found along this spectrum. Common in popular accounts of the global spread of English is a perspective that views the expansion of the language as a more or less politically neutral process. Such accounts claim that, while the spread of English has its roots in the history of colonialism, the imperialistic meaning of English is now erased from the language, and that it is now adopted by people around the world as a useful means for accessing education, cultural products, and the international society, even though speakers may also want to maintain their own local language as a symbol of their identity and for their sense of belonging. In this view, English is seen primarily as a neutral tool, now available for people around the world to freely choose and use for any purpose as they see fit. David Crystal’s popular book, English as a global language, is a well-known example of this view. Crystal explains that English became an international language simply as a result

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Unspeakable English? Investigating global English in local context

of English being “in the right place at the right time” (Crystal 1997: 110), making invisible the hegemonic dominance of English in former British colonies and other places of the world. He also acknowledges various criticisms of the spread of English (quoting writings of Gandhi and Ngugi, among others), noting that local languages should preferably be maintained alongside the global language of English so that local cultural traditions may also be preserved. However, in Crystal’s treatment the benefits of English are much greater than, or at least can balance out, any of its negative effects, so the tone of his book remains largely positive and celebratory of English. Pennycook (2000, 2001) calls such a position “laissez-faire liberalism,” which idealizes the complementarity of global and local languages: the global language of English for science and international communication, local languages for the expression of identity and preservation of community. While this position is attractive in that it appears to take the best of both worlds, it is problematic because English ends up being placed in an advanced and privileged position, while local languages are cast in a more static imagery of backwardness. Thus, the perspective of scholars such as Crystal cannot be a neutral, apolitical description of the state of English. In fact, Crystal’s position must be seen as highly ideological, relying on an uncritical acknowledgement of economic globalization and the hegemony of Western English-speaking nations (Phillipson 1999), even though Crystal on several occasions claims to do otherwise. As Pennycook notes, laissez-faire liberalism can very easily slip into an overtly colonial celebration of English, praising the triumph of English as people all over the world willingly adopt the tongue that has adapted to new purposes and needs (2001: 57). Pennycook also points out that this liberalism is in fact quite common in the academic circles of applied linguistics and sociolinguistics; though frequently less triumphant in tone than Crystal, many researchers tend to prefer a seemingly balanced position by validating both the spread of English and individual speakers’ language rights without reference to the dynamics of power (Pennycook 2000: 110). It is interesting in this regard to consider the influential “World Englishes paradigm,” most closely associated with the work of Braj Kachru (1982, 1986, 1997, 2005). In this tradition, heavy emphasis is placed on pluricentrism; new varieties of English are given recognition as valid norms, on a par with traditionally accepted norms such as British or American English. In the course of making these arguments, Kachruvian studies are much concerned with questioning the relationships of power that have denounced new varieties of English as invalid, and also the sociolinguistic notions upon which such relationships rest, such as those of native speaker, speech community, and standard language. Thus, in this framework, there is an underlying critical orientation to the hege-

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mony of English as it influences how new varieties of English are perceived and treated by the Western center of native English speakers, and in this sense, this approach contrasts with the seemingly apolitical but nonetheless ideological orientation of scholars such as Crystal. However, in a large number of works written within the World Englishes tradition, a critical perspective on the global spread of English is not always integrated into actual analysis. We can suspect that this is not necessarily a matter of neglect on the part of individual researchers, but a somewhat natural outcome of the emphasis placed on pluricentrism. For studies in World Englishes, the focus is often on the systematicity and creativity of new Englishes. In arguing for the uniqueness, vitality, and validity of these varieties, these studies pay less attention to the structures of power in which new varieties of English are located. Also, in these studies, aspects of hybridity and appropriation are highlighted, so that the traditional concept of “ownership” of English may be challenged. While this tendency is understandably and commendably motivated by the need to question the hegemony of English as centered in English-speaking Western states, it also has the danger of becoming another kind of apolitical position, as vitality of new Englishes is taken as evidence for neutralization of Western dominance, erasing still existing systemic inequalities between languages and societies. Thus, Canagarajah (1999a) points out that, “taken to the extreme, such premises can inspire one to adopt a cavalier attitude towards domination. They can create a debilitating apathy, relativism, and insularity among scholars – as is evident in certain circles of academia today” (p. 209). Such criticisms remind us that an apolitical understanding of the global spread of English can be surprisingly common, even among frameworks of research that may be overtly critical of the hegemony of Western English-speaking countries. In reaction to this tendency, a large number of works began to appear in the 1990s that were uncompromising in their characterization of the structural inequalities in the world system that drive and support the global spread of English. In particular, Robert Phillipson’s (1992) work on linguistic imperialism has been highly influential in making the political and economic hegemony of English-speaking Western powers an explicit focus of analysis. He argues that the world dominance of English is promoted and maintained through material and institutional structures such as those of the academic establishment and the British Council, which are in turn based on beliefs about English as a superior language. As the spread of English is explicitly tied to powerful political and cultural institutions, there is no room in this perspective for an apolitical, neutral stance. Such critical perspectives also form the basis of the approaches of linguistic ecology (M¨uhlh¨ausler 1996) and linguistic human rights (SkutnabbKangas and Phillipson 1994; Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas 1995). These

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frameworks emphasize both the threat that English as a global language poses to the balance and harmony of the world’s languages and also the rights of minority language speakers whose way of life and linguistic self-determination are at risk. Again, the focus of analysis is global and local relationships of power. While these approaches have received negative reactions from scholars who prefer a more “neutral” standpoint (for example, see Kibbee 1993; Markee 1993; Conrad 1996), their critical perspective has successfully influenced the general tone of research conducted on the global spread of English today. However, even for researchers who actively adopt such a critical perspective, the models of linguistic imperialism, language ecology, and linguistic human rights are sometimes seen as problematic, for these frameworks often rely on broad, rigid categories such as the center and periphery, or essentialist understandings of the nature of language and community. For instance, Freeland and Patrick (2004) point out that discussions on language endangerment and linguistic human rights are often based on simplistic and problematic assumptions, including the old idea that there is an essential connection between a language and a people’s identity. Such notions are problematic not only because they miss the fact that it is language varieties and their everyday usage, rather than abstract “languages,” that are at stake in the context of language loss (Blommaert 2003), but more importantly because they risk another form of imposition upon local cultures and societies. Hill (2002) shows, for example, how various metaphors frequently employed by “expert” linguists in discussions of language endangerment may have unintended negative effects that alienate speakers of the endangered languages and other members of their community. In addition, in emphasizing the systematic inequalities that reproduce the hegemony of English throughout the world, these critical models fall short of explaining how the spread of English also occurs through means other than direct imposition. For example, it has been pointed out that British colonial language policy did not always promote the use of English in the colonies, but sometimes fostered vernacular language education, even though this was also motivated by the need for colonial control and subjugation of the local population (Pennycook 1994, 2002; Brutt-Griffler 2002). Nor is much consideration given to how individuals deal with English in social context. That is, the fact that individual speakers play an important part in the struggle between the hegemony of English and its local appropriation and resistance is often overlooked (Canagarajah 1999b; H. Shin 2006). As we will see below, metalinguistic discourse produced by individuals is often the very site in which the tension between these conflicting forces materializes (Ramanathan 2005). Therefore, while the problems raised by the critical approaches of linguistic imperialism, language ecology, and linguistic human rights are very real, it should also be understood that they

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do not comprise the entire picture of how the global spread of English takes place and what its outcomes are. The overview so far shows that it is very important to clearly recognize the political implications of various perspectives adopted in research on global English. As a politically charged issue, the question of the global spread of English should be addressed by incorporating the perspective of the members of the local group faced with the tidal wave of English. This implies that researchers should reflexively evaluate their ideological stance as they engage in studying local communities so that they can avoid imposing their own simplifying viewpoints in their analyses. These concerns are reflected in some current research, with more and more work attempting a careful analysis of the complexities that reside in the dynamics of dominance, resistance, and appropriation of English in local contexts. For example, Pennycook (2003) uses the notion of performativity to show how Japanese rappers construct multilayered identities through the language of global hip hop; in doing so, he argues that the lyrics and music of Japanese hip hop cannot be easily analyzed in terms of fixed, pre-established identities or the dichotomy of resistance vs. celebration of English. Studies like these inform us of the potential ways in which the global spread of English may influence local speakers in their dynamic use of English. However, we might argue that understanding the complexity of local language use has to do not only with the analyses we make, but also with the kind of data we choose to study. That is, while hip hop music in Asia, clearly an outcome of the cross-border flow of cultures and languages, is an important site for the study of global English, we also need to focus on how people construct the meaning of English in other domains of everyday life that are less obviously engaged with global English, in which a different configuration of market forces may be at work (Park and Wee 2008). It is ultimately those everyday uses of discourse in which local meanings of English are constructed, and where English as a global language starts to have a true impact on the local culture and community. This issue leads to the other dimension of research on the global spread of English: its methodology. 2.2. The methodological dimension of research on global English The global spread of English is an issue that spans several disciplines, including linguistics, sociology, anthropology, English studies, and globalization studies, and for this reason, various research methods and paradigms have been applied to its investigation. It is important to note here that, even though particular researchers are often associated with one type of methodology more than others, it is typically the case that a combination of several of these approaches is adopted in any particular study.

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Unspeakable English? Investigating global English in local context

One major methodological approach to studying the global spread of English is based on the field of linguistics. Focusing on the different varieties that arise as a result of the spread of English, this approach describes variation in such new forms of the language. Since the 1980s, many books have appeared that compare and contrast varieties of English across the world (e.g. Pride 1982; Platt et al. 1984; Cheshire 1991; Trudgill and Hannah 1994; McArthur 2002; Melchers and Shaw 2003). In addition, a large number of books have focused on detailed descriptions of a single national or regional variety which has gained significant recognition. The new Englishes that have been treated in these works include, to name only a few, those of India (Kachru 1983), the Philippines (Bautista 1997), Hong Kong (Bolton 2002), and Singapore and Malaysia (Platt and Weber 1980; L. Lim 2004). There is also a large body of work done on what are traditionally considered native-speaker varieties (e.g., Australian English, New Zealand English, Scottish English, not to mention American and British English) and English-based creoles. Together with the large number of articles in the journals World Englishes, English World-Wide, and English Today, there is no shortage of studies that follow this approach. Also related to this direction of research are accounts of the influence of English on local languages, or Englishization (Kachru 1994). Taken together, studies on nativization of English and Englishization of local languages represent a perspective which focuses on the linguistic or formal consequences of the global spread of English. Such studies also provide validation to those new forms of English, since the focus in these studies is often the systematicity and regularity of the linguistic phenomena under study. However, while this approach identifies one clear outcome of globalization of English (i.e., change in linguistic structure) and provides a great deal of insight for contact linguistics, it neither explains what the change in linguistic structure means for the given community in global context, nor is it able to account for the process of the spread of English itself, due to its focus on formal features of language. An alternative approach to global English is based on macro-sociolinguistics. Works that fall under the framework of sociology of language (Fishman et al. 1977; Fishman et al. 1996) or the field of “geolinguistics,” which is concerned with the expansion of languages within space in a geographical, societal, political, and temporal sense (Breton 1991; see also de Swann 2001; Maurais and Morris 2003), are some examples of this approach. This research direction investigates English in relation to a range of macro social variables, such as domains of English language use, patterns of bilingualism and diglossia, the legal status of English, education policy, and speaker statistics, to draw a detailed picture of the place of English in various contexts across the globe. In other words, in contrast to the formal approach to the global spread of English, this

Research on the global spread of English

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approach focuses on the functions of English across societies and nations. As a result, studies carried out within this approach have been able to demonstrate, for example, how English across various postcolonial contexts is systematically tied to social stratification through its place within education, which serves as an institutionalized mechanism for maintaining the hegemony of English (Fishman et al. 1996). In doing so, such studies serve as groundwork for other kinds of research on English in global context, providing the necessary sociological background for investigating the use of English in individual societies. Similarly, other macro-level studies focus on language policy issues as a rich ground upon which the local impact of global English can be analyzed. The tension between English and other languages and the ideologies that underlie responses to such tension have been a central question for language policy and planning in many countries around the world, a topic that has been addressed in detail by many researchers (Tollefson 1991; Hornberger 1998; Cummins 2000; Ricento 2000; Skutnabb-Kangas 2000; Schmid 2001). These studies have discussed how discourses and sociopolitical pressures that promote English are manifest in local policy and practice, and how those forces normally coexist with appropriative, alternative, or resistant discourses, demonstrating that the question of global English, while emerging in similar forms across different contexts, is always deeply embedded in local social relations. Various studies on bilingual education or medium of instruction policy, for instance, discuss how the policy and practice of educational language policies across diverse contexts (including immigrant communities in North America) are often explicitly motivated and contested based on socially dominant language ideologies about English (Cummins 2000; Mazrui 2003; Wiley and Wright 2004; Ferguson 2006; Shohamy 2006, among others). This shows that analyses of macrosocial functions of English, particularly when supported by a politically critical perspective, can be useful in outlining how the power of English in a given society is constructed through an intersection of competing local discourses which in turn link with the global hegemony of the language. These macro perspectives, however, are also limited in that they do not focus on individual speakers or specific instances of discourse. That is, they acknowledge but do not study the agentive role of local speakers as a key element in the process through which the hegemony of English is established, as the micro-level processes through which those speakers engage in discursive construction of language ideologies remain unobservable to a researcher who is focusing on macro-level social variables or national policies of language. What is needed, then, is a perspective that crosses the macro-micro divide to find grounding for large-scale social phenomena in details of metalinguistic discourse. Recently, there has been a number of works that have addressed this

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Unspeakable English? Investigating global English in local context

issue. In the field of applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, for instance, there is a growing body of research that explores the link between policy issues and discourse in instructional settings, usually based on ethnographic observations of classroom interaction (Pakir 1991; Canagarajah 1999b; Heller and MartinJones 2001; Hornberger 2003; Lin 1999; Ramanathan 2005). Such ethnographic approaches are promising in that they can uncover the complexity of local imaginations of English, allowing the researcher to focus on the agency of individual speakers while not losing sight of the social and discursive constraints that surround them. Engaging with the perspective of the discourse participants provides us with an important vantage point that will help us understand how the hegemony of English is not merely an outcome of global forces but also mediated by practices on the grassroots level. This insight, however, has not been extended well beyond educational settings. While the classroom is an extremely important institutional setting that contributes to global modernity, it is obviously not the only site where the meaning of English is constructed. To date, a relatively small number of studies have explored the meaning of global English as it emerges in local discourse practices beyond instructional contexts, such as Hall’s (2003) work on the use of English as a symbolic resource in parodic performances by koti transgenders in India, Besnier’s (2002) analysis of intersection of class, gender, and English in a Tongan beauty pageant, and another study by Besnier (2004) which explores the role of English as an expression of cosmopolitanism at a Tongan marketplace. These studies are highly illuminative accounts of the local imagination of the global, and even though they do not explicitly deal with understanding the global spread of English, the local perspective that they provide is precisely the type of viewpoint that we need in order to understand how the power of global English is constructed from the ground up. We might also argue that for research on language and globalization, it is particularly important to investigate discourse processes in multiple sites and to understand their interconnectedness, for it is ultimately through such interconnectedness that globalization is accomplished, as illustrated by long-range, multi-sited projects such as Heller’s (2003), which interrogates the transformation of the linguistic landscape in francophone Canada under the changing conditions of the global economy. For now, we are left without a systematic overview of how the global spread of English is mediated by discursive work by speakers as they engage in myriad sites of their language life that are nonetheless linked by structural and material conditions of discourse production. Thus, there is a pressing need for research that engages multiple sites beyond the classroom, employing both macro and micro perspectives, and investigating how meaning of English is constructed through discourse as well as large-scale social forces.

Language ideology as a framework of inquiry

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Such a framework will be able to incorporate the advantages of the approaches reviewed in this section and guide us towards a deeper investigation of the question of global English.

3. Language ideology as a framework of inquiry In this section, I outline a theoretical framework which, I argue, can fruitfully address the shortcomings of the political and methodological positions discussed in the previous section while building on their strengths. This framework is the linguistic-anthropological approach to language ideology. Here, I present an overview of language ideology as a field of inquiry and how it contributes to our understanding of the construction of languages and communities, and then explain why this framework can be useful for thinking about the global spread of English, particularly in Korean context. 3.1. The framework of language ideology It was Michael Silverstein’s 1979 paper, which defined language ideology as “any sets of beliefs about language articulated by the users as a rationalization or justification of perceived language structure and use” (Silverstein 1979: 193), that brought speakers’ interpretations about the relationship between language and society to the attention of the fields of linguistics and anthropology. Until then, the focus of analysis in both fields was typically on the structurally analyzable nature of language, which was often imagined as an autonomous system (see discussion in Woolard 1998; Kroskrity 2004). Of course, several subfields within these disciplines, most notably sociolinguistics, had pointed out the importance of speakers’ evaluations of language varieties, or language attitudes, but since Silverstein’s contribution, beliefs about language came to be thought of as exerting a more fundamental influence on the structure and usage of language. It is now well recognized that speakers’ conceptualizations of how language is organized and used within its social context should not be dismissed as naive folk beliefs. On the contrary, they must be seen as an important force in the regularization and innovation of linguistic structure, a mechanism through which power and social meaning are attributed to forms of language, and a foundation upon which differentiation and identification among communities and identities are accomplished. In other words, language ideology is a fundamental key for understanding how language and society intersect with and constitute each other.

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Unspeakable English? Investigating global English in local context

Silverstein (1979, 1985) showed that language ideology has the power to influence linguistic structure by demonstrating how speakers’ beliefs about the organization of grammatical systems may influence grammatical structures, through a range of examples including Javanese speech levels, English gender pronouns, and English pronouns of deference. In these examples, speakers’ interpretations about a particular aspect of grammatical organization work as generalizations that may lead to analogical language change and regularization of linguistic structure. Seen in this way, language ideology is not a failure on the part of speakers to correctly analyze how their language works, but an important source for linguistic structure itself. Given the centrality of analogical change in historical linguistics, this means that an analysis of language ideology must be an integral part of our understanding of how grammatical organization comes into being. The theoretical importance of language ideology also lies in its role in connecting linguistic form and social meaning. Early models of sociolinguistics often posited a simplistic correlation between linguistic variables (of phonology, grammar, lexis, and pragmatics) and social variables (such as age, gender, social class, region, etc.), implying that a particular linguistic form can directly represent a social group marked by a social variable. While this assumption has been problematized in many ways (see chapter 6 for more discussion on this issue), a question that is relevant here is: What is the nature of such connections, and how do they come to be established in the first place? Since there is no reason to think that any kind of linguistic variable should inherently be associated with a particular social variable, the connection between a formal feature and its social meaning must come from speakers’ social interpretation of linguistic form at some level of consciousness. In other words, the social meaning of linguistic patterns must derive from language ideology, from the intersection of speakers’ beliefs about a particular linguistic form and their perception of a particular social group (Woolard 1998; Eckert 2000; Irvine 2001). An important related point is the role of language in the construction of community and identity. It is now well recognized that communities are not given, but rather constructed, and that language is one of the primary means through which this is accomplished (Anderson 1991). For example, the belief that a single language signifies a unified, coherent identity has contributed significantly to the emergence of modern nation-states as well as various communities on a smaller scale. In fact, not only are differences and similarities between languages or dialects often used as a basis for speakers’ perception of group boundaries, but also actively employed in the construction of identities (Irvine and Gal 2000; Bucholtz and Hall 2004). This suggests that the implications of language ideology reach far beyond language itself. Beliefs about language draw a map that

Language ideology as a framework of inquiry

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can be superposed upon the world, selectively highlighting or making invisible group boundaries and identities, and also locating them within a field of power, thus generating social hierarchies and advocating the interests of particular positions but not others. In this sense, language ideology is a cognitive framework that constructs relationships of power deeply fundamental to society through the semiotics of language. Language ideology, therefore, provides a crucial window through which we can investigate the intersection of language and society. Since the global spread of English inherently concerns the dynamics of globalization, language, and social organization, and how social interests and relationships of power are reproduced through the index of language, approaching this issue from the perspective of language ideology becomes a highly relevant enterprise. In the next section, I outline in more detail how the spread of English as a global language must be understood as a language-ideological issue.

3.2. The global spread of English as a language-ideological issue The global spread of English is often assumed to be natural accompaniment to what is simply called globalization. Popular accounts of globalization (and sometimes, scholarly treatments of the subject) typically include descriptions of the ubiquitous presence of English in the world along with Coca Cola, Hollywood movies, and hip hop music. In these accounts, billboards, songs, and conversations in English found in places where the language may appear to be “out of place” are undeniable evidence that waves of globalization have penetrated even such unlikely places, wherever these may be. This implies that forces of globalization – increased cross-border flows of finances, goods, people, and cultural products and ideas – are often taken to provide an obvious explanation for how English has expanded beyond the boundaries of traditionally Englishspeaking countries and their former colonies. One example which shows that scholarly discourse on globalization is also subject to this same assumption is that the extent of the global spread of English is often taken to be directly indicative of whether a homogenizing “global culture” is on the rise (Guill´en 2001). For instance, since the penetration of English into the world is remarkable but not total (major regional and local languages are obviously thriving despite the spread of English into many societies), in some studies the force of cultural globalization is subsequently evaluated as not being homogenizing, but open to divergence. While this conclusion itself is likely to be a valid one, the perspective of language ideology points out a problem with the assumption that underlies this line of reasoning. That is, under this logic,

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Unspeakable English? Investigating global English in local context

the relationship between the global spread of English and cultural globalization is considered to be automatic, one directly indicating the other. However, the framework of language ideology outlined above suggests that both processes must be mediated in relation to each other through people’s conceptualizations of how English indexes global modernity, local identities, and international and intercultural relationships. In this sense, the connection between globalization and the spread of English as a global language is by no means automatic, but something that must be accomplished through the articulation and reproduction of language ideologies. Similar points may be raised for previous research on the global spread of English. While most of these studies do not seriously incorporate the notion of globalization, on one level or another, the spread of English is often attributed to a particular macro-social variable or large-scale social process. For example, de Swann (2001) posits that the spread of English is predicted by its high communication value (or “Q-value”) – combination of a language’s prevalence, or number of speakers, and its centrality, or the extent to which the language is used for communication between people whose native languages are mutually unintelligible. Thus, according to his model, the global spread of English can be directly correlated with a particular social variable – the social distribution of language, in this case. However, we can argue that it is not the widespread use of English itself, but language users’ ideological belief in the language’s importance and influence regarding its widespread use that ultimately makes languages such as English gain wider currency. While most studies do not explain the global spread of English based primarily on a single variable, one can frequently find arguments that connect particular macro-social processes with the global spread of English, on the assumption that the spread of English is a direct, natural outcome of those large-scale processes themselves. For example, critical studies such as Phillipson (1992) present the extensive efforts of institutions like the British Council to promote English world-wide as one of the driving forces for the spread of English. Again, such overt political and material influences of imperial powers are given as important mechanisms that cause English to spread across the world. While such forces no doubt support the language’s global hegemony, this explanation is incomplete as it lacks an account of how the “forced” implantation of English by powerful institutions comes to be accepted by the local community so that English may actually spread through it. Examples like these show the importance of considering language ideology in the study of the global spread of English. The framework of language ideology does not merely fill a gap in previous literature; the question of the global spread of English must be considered a language-ideological issue in itself. That is, the

Language ideology as a framework of inquiry

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question of how English gains hegemony on a world-wide scale while also adapting to serve new meanings in local contexts is necessarily bound up with how local speakers come to conceptualize English in a particular way so as to adopt, resist, and appropriate English within their social situations. To be sure, the study of beliefs about language has been a part of the study of the global spread of English for some time. Based on social-psychological research that grew out of the study of language use in multilingual contexts (Giles et al. 1991), much research has been carried out on how beliefs about English and local languages may influence the status and use of English within a given society (e.g. Flaitz 1988 on English in France; Loveday 1996 on English in Japan). However, in these studies, indexes of language attitudes are not understood in the context of the complex dynamics of the ideological construction of English, but rather are treated as first-order variables which stand in a direct relationship to social patterns of language use; thus, the shortcomings of correlational sociolinguistic studies are repeated here. On the other hand, critical approaches to the global spread of English take a more sophisticated perspective. These studies identify specific ideologies of language that are manifest in written texts and language policies, and show how these ideologies contribute to the construction of English as a hegemonic language, thus highlighting the role of language ideology in the global spread of English. For example, ideologies that frame English as an advanced, versatile, and “marvelous tongue” or ideologies that associate English with the resources of science and education have played a major role in the broad acceptance of English worldwide (Bailey 1991; Phillipson 1992; Pennycook 1994, 1998). However, even in these studies, the specific processes through which language ideology allows local communities to adopt English and imbue it with new meaning are not fully explored. That is, the question of how such ideologies do not simply emanate from the powerful institutions of English but also find their way into local discourses and become naturalized is not discussed in detail. Yet, it is precisely this process that must be clarified in order to produce a full picture of how English has become a global language. After all, according to the work of many social theorists, an important aspect of the power of institutions does not reside in their direct control over individuals and society, but in the way their domination is realized and constituted through the everyday lived experiences and micropractices of their subjects (Foucault 1977; Gramsci 1971). Institutional power of English thus exemplifies Bourdieu’s (1991) notion of symbolic domination, in which legitimacy is accorded to institutions and their representatives not through forced imposition but through structured dispositions that the linguistic market inculcates in subjects. It is not enough to point out the power of institutions behind the hegemony of English; it also becomes necessary to learn

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Unspeakable English? Investigating global English in local context

how such power is reproduced and naturalized through everyday manifestations of that hegemony. This perspective is also helpful in allowing us to consider another important aspect of the spread of English in the context of globalization. The way English is constructed as a global language is based not only on its global presence but also on the material conditions of the new global economy that have specific consequences for the value and usage of languages (Heller 1999, 2003; Cameron 2000, 2005). Again, this process through which the values of different linguistic varieties and resources are renegotiated within the changing linguistic market (Bourdieu 1991) is essentially one which consists of contestation and reproduction of language ideologies. Therefore, the framework of language ideology helps us keep our focus on how political economy and semiosis go hand in hand. Semiotic mediation is a large part of what enables material processes within social order (Irvine 1989); at the same time, semiotic work is conditioned by the material basis upon which social relationships are configured. For this reason, approaching the global spread of English from a language ideological point of view helps us develop the links between the global hegemony of English, local and global conditions of the new economy, and micro-level practices of individual speakers, an important connection which has been overlooked in previous work.

3.3. Language ideology and the question of English in Korea The framework of language ideology can be particularly useful in studying the place of English in Korea. While Korea was never colonized by an Englishspeaking country, the strong military presence and economic and cultural influence of the United States in the southern half of the Korean peninsula that continue to the present day make Korea comparable in important ways to former colonies of English-speaking nations. However, Korea is also different from those postcolonial nations in several respects, one of which is that it remains highly monolingual in Korean as far as everyday language use goes, even though there is a strong presence of English in the domains of popular culture and education, as I will discuss in more detail in the next chapter. This makes the Korean linguistic situation a unique one, since the great majority of postcolonial nations in which English has a large impact on society are often highly multilingual. The implication of this is that many indicators that have been used to evaluate the influence of English – such as patterns of multilingualism, code-switching, nativization of English, and Englishization of the local language – become difficult to apply to the Korean context, and for this reason it is problematic to study

Language ideology as a framework of inquiry

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the place of English in the Korean situation using frameworks that rely on such indicators. That is, approaches to the global spread of English that focus on quantifiable distributions of macro-social variables or language structure would not be so productive because of the fact that Korea is still highly monolingual, even if we ignore the inherent shortcomings of those approaches as discussed above. For example, Baik (1992, 1994) and Shim (1994) attempt to demonstrate the influence of English on Korean language use and identity construction by applying Kachru’s World Englishes paradigm, with a primary focus on linguistic phenomena that they see as evidence of Englishization. Baik (1994) lists several syntactic features of Englishization, such as the use of the plural morpheme -deul (in places where the meaning of plurality is clear from the noun phrase itself), the use of the numeral han ‘one’ as an indefinite marker (used in place of the English indefinite article), and the use of the past tense marker -eoss to indicate perfective aspect (-eoss expressing past tense, the doubled form -eosseoss expressing past perfect). He then goes on to say that these provide strong evidence of the influence of English on Korean, claiming “the direction for language change in Korea has become quite clear” (1994: 164). However, Song (1998) argues that it is not necessarily clear that all the phenomena that Baik discusses can be understood as cases of Englishization. For example, the plural morpheme -deul in Korean can also be used as a marker of distribution and focus; thus what appear to be “redundant” uses of the morpheme do not necessarily imply an influence from English. Song also points out that the development of an indefinite marker from the numeral meaning ‘one’ is quite common typologically, so this may be an independent change rather than change resulting from contact with English. This underlines the difficulty of using such evidence for outlining the influence of English in Korea, where possible interference from English exists but remains subtle due to Korea’s monolingualism. Nonetheless, in a response paper to Song, Baik and Shim (1998) continue to argue that English is exerting a major influence on Korean society and language use. Indeed, they are justified in doing so, given the heavy emphasis on English language learning by individuals and the government and the increasing presence of English in popular media. Baik and Shim’s problem, then, seems to lie in the fact that approaches that rely on describing formal patterns in language cannot capture the totality of the place of English in Korea, due to the simple fact that Koreans do not use English much in their everyday lives. Methods that have been developed with the contexts of multilingual postcolonial societies in mind (such as India, upon which Kachru’s early work was based) and thus focus on factors such as linguistic interference can only be of limited use, because, even though Korea shares some social realities with other postcolonial situations in Asia, it is also distinguished by its linguistic situation.

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Unspeakable English? Investigating global English in local context

In fact, the work by Baik and Shim serves as a good demonstration of why the approach of language ideology can be a useful framework for analyzing the place of English in Korean society. Even though the features of Englishization discussed by Baik and Shim may be controversial from a linguistic standpoint, it is precisely those features which are consistently criticized as beonyeoktu ‘translation style’ (a style influenced by literal translations from English) by language purists who deplore the uncritical adoption of foreign elements within the Korean language (see chapter 2 for more discussion of linguistic purism in Korea). In other words, regardless of their origin, it is important that these features are perceived as resulting from the influence of English. Therefore, it would be beneficial to study why these features come to be recognized as such, and where anxiety and insecurity about these features and about the current state of the Korean language (as exemplified by purification efforts) come from. This direction of research would not have the problem of having to justify the historical source of these changes (if they are historical at all), and would be able to appropriately address the widespread perception among Koreans that English is having an enormous influence on their linguistic and social lives. An approach based on language ideology, then, can be a useful way to study the place and meaning of English in Korea. Even though Koreans do not necessarily use much English in their everyday lives, they may certainly hold ideologies that can serve as the basis for the construction of English as a hegemonic language. Indeed, dominance of a language is not necessarily about everyone speaking that particular variety; on the contrary, such dominance is often closely tied to restriction in access to the dominant code, and how through such restriction the code comes to be tied with authority (Bourdieu 1991). Thus, the fact that Koreans place great importance on English yet remain monolingual in Korean needs to be closely investigated with respect to the ideologies of English that sustain such patterns. That is, we need to ask how do Koreans understand their relationship to English: how do they view the quality and utility of the English that they have learned in relation to “native speaker” varieties of English; what do they believe about the penetration of English into the Korean language; how do they link the material conditions of the global economy with their sociolinguistic condition; and finally, how do such ideas contribute to the construction of English as a hegemonic language? This will in turn provide us with a basis for understanding more fundamental questions about the relationship between globalization and English. If monolingualism in a local language does not necessarily mean resistance to the hegemony of English, what does this tell us about the way local meanings of global English are constructed? How can speakers’ conceptualization of their linguistic resources lead to global consequences beyond their immediate linguistic market? A closer inspection of

The approach: Metalinguistic discourse as focus of analysis

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the Korean situation through the framework of language ideology can help us ask these questions and more. In the next section, I present specific details of how I apply this approach to Korean context.

4. The approach: Metalinguistic discourse as focus of analysis In this book, I study the ideological construction of English in Korea through an analysis of metalinguistic discourse, text or talk produced in natural, nonelicited contexts which deals with language – in this case, English. This choice of data reflects a critical understanding of previous research which incorporates language attitudinal analysis. In previous studies of global English there have been attempts to employ language attitudinal data collected through surveys and interviews (e.g. self-rated fluency in English, preference for using English vs. other language, etc.); but while those studies have been informative, these sources of data are generally limited for several reasons. First, it is not necessarily the case that what speakers say they believe represents the entire range of their underlying beliefs about language as reflected through their linguistic and social practices (Silverstein 1981 [2001]). Second, it does not tell us how specific responses from speakers are generated as an outcome of a social process that leads to a particular construction of English, for even those responses must have been produced in interaction with the system of cultural and social constraints that shape the speakers’ linguistic repertoire (Briggs 1986). Third, it is unclear whether there may be alternative ideologies which could be in competition and which could surface in other contexts but not in the formal context of interaction with the researcher. This book is based on the assumption that a focus on naturally-occurring metalinguistic discourse can help us address the limitations of previous approaches. Studying the way Koreans metalinguistically comment on English can help us avoid the problem of relying only on macro social variables as explanations of how the meaning of English is constructed in Korean society. Since the construction of English as a global language must be mediated through people’s language use in social context, using metalinguistic discourse as data allows us to directly deal with this process of semiotic mediation. In addition, using naturally-occurring metalinguistic discourse can help us study how language ideologies are manifested and reproduced within social context. This allows us to focus on language ideologies as dynamic filters that shape our social action (Woolard 1998), rather than as static variables in simple correlation to social phenomena, as might be suggested by traditional social-psychological methods.

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Unspeakable English? Investigating global English in local context

For this research, metalinguistic discourse data were collected from several different contexts. The notion of discursive sites (Silverstein 1998; Philips 2000) was central to the approach taken in this book. Philips (2000) explains this notion by contrasting it with “context” as used in linguistic anthropology (and also sociolinguistics in general). “Context” may refer to specific, concrete instances of interactions or domains of language use; “site” is similar to “context” except that it is something that is culturally constructed, an emic notion that refers to a culture-specific understanding of a scene of discourse production (see also Wee 2006). The notion of discursive sites is critical to our understanding of language ideologies because workings of ideologies are both multisited and site-specific (Philips 2000). They are multisited in that ideologies of language are realized across multiple sites in society, so that their articulation is not just limited to a particular site but relevant to many different sites, which may contribute to their social significance. They are site-specific in that the ways ideologies are articulated within any given site are subject to speakers’ metapragmatic understandings of that site (themselves language ideologies that stipulate how discourse production within that site is supposed to work). This multisited and site-specific nature of language ideologies has much significance for their reproduction. Through multisitedness, we can learn how ideologies may become dominant, as we observe how they are reproduced across different sites throughout society. This interconnectedness of sites gives rise to interdiscursivity (Silverstein and Urban 1996; Agha and Wortham 2005), enabling ideas about language to be circulated and articulated in other sites, increasing the prevalence of specific language ideologies. Through site-specificness, we can learn about the way language ideologies interact with specific social constraints that are ideologically tied to each site. Since the particular manifestations of ideologies within a site must be subject to these metapragmatic constraints, this provides us with a way of understanding how social interests and positions may play a role in the reproduction of ideologies. Thus, sources of data were chosen so that articulation and reproduction of ideologies of English could be studied across multiple sites. These sites were selected so that both explicit and implicit displays of ideologies could be observed (Silverstein 1993), and so that the multisited and site-specific characteristics of language ideologies could be identified through their interconnectedness. The specific sites from which the data were collected are the following. More detailed description of the significance and nature of each site will be presented in the chapters to follow. – Written debates on English language use in Korea: Written texts that were produced in the context of a public language policy debate between 1998 and 2001, which centered on the question of whether English should be

The approach: Metalinguistic discourse as focus of analysis

23

established as an official language of Korea, were collected from Korean print media. – Cross-linguistic humor that makes use of English: A large number of KoreanEnglish yumeo (‘humor’), self-contained texts of jokes, riddles, or accounts of humorous experiences that either make use of or make reference to English, were collected, both from observation of Korean speakers in conversation and from Internet bulletin boards. – Humorous uses of English in television entertainment shows: Instances in which English is used for humorous purposes in scripted television entertainment shows, including situation comedies and variety shows, were collected. – Talk about English in face-to-face interaction: Korean speakers engaged in naturally-occurring face-to-face interaction, such as group study sessions, television game shows, and casual conversation, where their talk dealt with English in some manner, were video and/or audio recorded. Using metalinguistic discourse produced within each site, I performed a qualitative discourse analysis, attending to the underlying language ideologies that can be inferred from the data. While explicit articulations of ideologies can be identified with relative ease by focusing on speakers’ overt statements or claims about language, I also focused on identifying ideologies articulated implicitly. The latter must be identified through analysis of metalinguistic practices (that is, recurrent, socially meaningful set of structured social actions that constitute a commentary on language structure or usage), through close observation of the way people treat different languages or speakers of different languages. Of course, it is unlikely that there would be a single surface component (e.g., a specific linguistic feature), or even a set of components, that would uniquely point to the presence of an underlying ideology. Rather, following earlier linguisticanthropological research (for example, Hill 1998 on identifying the ideology of ‘nostalgia’ in Mexicano), when a generalized pattern of treatment of English was observed based on recurrent components and a coherent theme, it was identified as an ideology of English. Note that this procedure is in accord with recent formulations of ideology within social theory and linguistic anthropology (Eagleton 1991; Woolard 1998) in that it does not assume ideologies to be “false ideas,” but instead places weight on the socially situated and interested nature of ideology by grounding ideology on specific situational practices of individuals in discursive contexts (Irvine 1989; Errington 2001). After identifying the underlying language ideologies of English, I studied the specific discursive mechanisms through which these ideologies are reinforced, naturalized, neutralized, or suppressed. Within each site, I observed how the site-specific metapragmatic constraints led certain ideologies to be highlighted

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Unspeakable English? Investigating global English in local context

and others to be hidden, and considered the possible discursive consequences such effects may have. The analysis of each site was linked with those of other sites as well, to study how the ideologies that are articulated in one site are interdiscursively connected to other sites so that ideologies may be reproduced in a multisited manner. An effort was also made to understand how the discursive consequences of such ideological work lead to social consequences as well, in order to develop a framework for explaining how ideologies of English, through its linkage with social and material conditions of Korean society, produces the effect of constructing English as a hegemonic language. Approaching ideology as socially situated ideas raises important questions about the researcher’s positionality, for if we identify the ideologies of our research subjects as partial we must also acknowledge that our own perspective is necessarily partial as well. For this reason, before I conclude the discussion of this book’s methodology I must also say a few words regarding my own social position in relation to the phenomena that I am attempting to account for. As an ethnic Korean who is born in the United States but grew up and educated in Korea, and a native speaker of Korean and (less unambiguously) of English, I believe that my liminal social status gives me an advantage in considering the question of English in Korea from both an etic and emic perspective. But of course this by no means gives me license to claim an objective and disinterested stance. For me, the most serious dilemma I face regarding my positionality is this: my relationship to English that arises out of my social background also places me in a highly interested position regarding what I am studying. While it is my ultimate goal to critique and problematize the hegemony of English in Korea and undo some of its “unspeakable” consequences, it is also obvious that my intention of writing this book has to do in part with developing a secure academic career – and my linguistic background and the opportunities they opened up (I am writing this book in English while working at an English-speaking university) certainly are crucial resources that allow me to do this. In this sense, I cannot honestly deny the possibility that I may in fact be contributing to that hegemony by serving as an example that valorizes English as a language of opportunity. Thus, just as I situate Korean discourses of English in local and global relations of power by using a framework of ideology, the reader is invited to treat the observations and claims that I convey through this book as situated ones, ideas that are grounded on the specific set of social positions that I, both as a researcher and as a person, occupy. On another level, though, I must also say that the uncomfortable awareness of my own positionality is what drove me to ponder the question of English in Korea in the first place. The ambivalence that I felt (and still do) towards English – between the desire to take it up and appropriate it and to criticize it and keep a

Overview: Three ideologies of English in Korea

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distance from it – made me question the source of this uneasy feeling, and as I turned my eyes to the discourses of English circulating in Korean society I came to notice similar tensions manifested on many different levels there. Since it is the very goal of my research to understand the processes by which Koreans deal with such tensions through discourse, this book may also be seen as a reflection on my own anxieties, doubts, and desires regarding English and the difficult position in which it places me. While this makes this book somewhat personal, I believe it actually brings my work in line with that of other researchers who have argued that the way to deal with researchers’ inevitable positionality is neither to deny it nor to despair over it, but to acknowledge it as a natural part of the sociolinguistic context that we must take into account. Thus, throughout this research, I allowed my subjective experiences to guide me in looking for potential spaces of metalinguistic discourse and in identifying their significance, while always trying to place that significance in social context – including that of my own positions and perceptions. It was my hope that this would allow for a responsible combination of reflexive awareness of my own partialness and rigorous methodological stance. No research can be bias-free, but a perspective which strives to acknowledge and account for such situatedness can open up channels for constructively critical theorization and analysis.

5. Overview: Three ideologies of English in Korea In this chapter, I introduced the question of the place of English in Korea, and discussed the theoretical significance of this issue. I outlined the literature on the global spread of English, and argued that the problem of English as a global language can be best understood as a language-ideological issue. An outline of the perspective of language ideology was presented, and the research methodology was discussed. Chapter 2 provides a general description of the linguistic situation in Korea relevant to English, which serves as the backdrop for this study. Chapters 3 through 6 analyze metalinguistic discourse within the four different discursive sites. Chapter 3 studies the texts of the “Official English” debate, chapter 4 analyzes Korean-English yumeo, chapter 5 discusses the humorous use of English in television entertainment shows, and chapter 6 deals with talk about English in face-to-face interaction. Building upon the findings of these chapters, chapter 7 concludes by emphasizing the importance of language ideology and metalinguistic discourse in the process of the global spread of English, and suggests several implications of this study for further research in related fields.

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Unspeakable English? Investigating global English in local context

The primary claim that will be made through this book is that conceptualizations of English in Korean society are mediated largely by an ideological complex that consists of at least three elements, or three ideologies, which can be summarized as the following. Note that the “-tion” suffix attached to each element is meant to reflect the understanding that language ideologies function by triggering semiotic work of distinction, legitimation, and others, thereby operating as a process, rather than a static belief (Irvine and Gal 2000; Bucholtz and Hall 2004). – Necessitation: This ideology views English as a valuable and indispensable language. The grounds for this necessity can be economical, cultural, and/or political. This ideology obviously connects with global discourses of English that valorize English as an (or rather, the) international language; it constructs English as a language one must acquire and secure in order to survive and flourish in the globalizing world. English is thus projected to have true relevance to local context through this ideology, regardless of actual patterns of language use. It also follows that lack of English skills is a significant problem for maintaining one’s (and by extension, a nation’s) well being in the modern world. – Externalization: This ideology views English as an external language, or as a language of an Other, treating it as a language that is incongruent with and opposed to the identity of one’s group. Thus, close alignment with English can potentially imply a betrayal of one’s identity and a disruption of the social order upon which that identity is based. The ideology of externalization, then, can be adopted to rationalize avoidance of and resistance to English. The identity in question here may be construed on various levels, but one that is commonly invoked is national and ethnic identity; nationalistic language attitudes clearly depend on this ideology in reinforcing the distinction between the local language of Korean and the global language of English. – Self-deprecation: This ideology views Koreans as lacking sufficient competence to use English meaningfully, despite the abundance of English education they receive. Under this view, Koreans in general, including the language user who displays this ideology, are incompetent in English; thus the name self-deprecation. The term self-deprecation is adopted from Lukas Tsitsipis (1995), who in turn borrows it from Eric Hamp’s work, but here I am specifying the term further by applying it to cultural and social constructions of linguistic competence in order to understand how a community may subordinate itself within a hierarchical relation of power through the mediation of such constructions.

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In the following chapters, we will discuss these ideologies in greater detail as they emerge through the data from the four discursive sites. Though it is beyond the scope of this book to explore the historical origins of each component of the ideological complex of English, it is worth pointing out here that each ideology is obviously connected to broader, globally circulating discourses of English, a point to which we will return briefly in chapter 7. By arguing that these three ideologies form an ideological complex, I intend to capture the fact that they are not always easily separable, particularly when we observe them in their implicitly articulated form, and that the constant interaction among the ideologies serves as the locus for the tensions and ambiguities about English that are manifest in various domains of Korean society. While I will talk about them in a discrete language for the ease of discussion, the chapters of this book will show that the three ideologies are better understood as elements of a holistic image of English that represents the general conceptualization of English in Korean society. In other words, the ideological complex of English is not merely an assemblage of available abstract ideas, but a part of the habitus that forms Koreans’dispositions that determine how they are supposed to act and respond in dealing with and making sense of English in their everyday lives, a state of body and mind that is inculcated through social conditions and relations (Bourdieu 1990, 1991). One consequence of this inseparability of the three ideologies is that, even though these ideologies may in some instances appear to be at odds with each other (for instance, necessitation and externalization may be considered to be opposite ideas in some contexts), they are not formulated and circulated independently. That is, they are inseparable from each other in the sense that, although each ideology may be closely tied to particular interested positions, an individual in Korean society cannot simply subscribe to one of the ideologies that serves his or her interests and choose to ignore the others. Stated on the most general level, in an abstract and decontextualized moment, the ideological complex is more or less balanced, composed of ideologies that point in different directions, resulting in an ambivalence towards English that is reflected in the complicated position the language occupies in Korean society (see Chapter 2). But it is the claim of this book that, as the ideological complex of English is circulated across various sites, it emerges in different configurations according to the social and metapragmatic constraints of each site, producing discursive effects that result in the construction of English as a hegemonic language – despite ideological forces that may work the other way. One major finding which I will demonstrate throughout this book is that across the four sites that I discuss, there is a particularly persistent and pernicious outcome in which Koreans are repeatedly constructed as illegitimate speakers of

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Unspeakable English? Investigating global English in local context

English. This illegitimation, rationalized by Koreans’ purported incompetence in the global language of English, justifies the subordination of Koreans within a global linguistic social order, thereby leading to an anxiety that drives the increasing emphasis on English in Korean society. In other words, the workings of language ideology within these discursive sites serve as a link between the two senses of unspeakableness of English in Korea. In the following chapters of this book, we will discuss this connection in greater detail. But before we begin, we must first look into the current place of English within Korean society, as the multiple issues that permeate the recent history of English in Korea will serve as an important backdrop for our discussion of language ideologies in the four different sites. In the next chapter, we turn to the story of the complex and sometimes bewildering historical, political, and symbolic position that English occupies in the nation.

Chapter 2 The English language in South Korea: History, politics, and sociolinguistics 1. South Korea as a monolingual society? Korea is often considered to be one of the countries with relatively strong monolingualism. For example, Baker and Prys Jones (1998) state that Korea is “one of the most linguistically and ethnically homogeneous countries in the world” (p. 382). Before we can discuss the place of English in Korea, however, we must explore this notion in more detail, for it is an issue that has much bearing on the status of English in Korea. It is now well recognized that the notion of national monolingualism is an ideological construct. Even though many modern nation-states are considered to be monolingual, this is largely a language myth, the result of erasing the vitality of minority languages and variation in language use, and adhering to the model of “one nation, one language” that was established during the formative periods of modernity (Anderson 1991). Similarly, the notion of Korea as a linguistically homogeneous nation has served the purpose of strengthening national unity throughout its recent history. The promotion of a standard variety of Korean, based on the Seoul dialect, contributed to the trivialization of regional dialects, some which are quite different from the standard. The dialects that are associated with traditionally less powerful regions, such as the Jeonla province, have especially been targeted for stigmatization (Go 1995). Neither is it true that Korea has no speakers of languages other than Korean. For example, the diasporic Chinese (hwagyo) have always had a small presence in Korea. More recently, there have been an increasing number of migrant workers from Southeast Asia and various other countries (Moon 2000), forming small communities of migrants in industrial cities such as Ansan (Shin Yun 2001). International marriage is also widespread nowadays, with more than one third of rural Korean men (who face much difficulty finding spouses domestically) marrying women from places such as China, Southeast Asia, and Central Asia (Jung 2007). In these cases, the burden of intercultural communication usually falls on those who migrated to Korea, and they must learn Korean in order to survive as linguistic minorities, as Koreans who interact with them rarely care to learn the “foreign” language and typically take it for granted that those minorities should adapt to the customs of Korea. But still, the presence of these speakers of other languages clearly testifies to the fact that it is not the

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The English language in South Korea: History, politics, and sociolinguistics

case that Korean is the only language that is spoken within the nation’s borders. In this sense, the idea that Korea is ethnically homogeneous and monolingual in Korean is clearly an ideological construction. In fact, even though many Koreans are proud of the country’s unified history that extend back 5,000 years, the notion of Korea as a minjok ‘nation/people’ is a twentieth-century construct, born in the context of colonization and modernization (Em 1999). Social, ethnic, and linguistic differences are erased through the ideology of danil minjok ‘unified people/pure-blooded people,’ resulting in the creation of a homogeneous imagined community. Yet, once this ideological nature of Korean monolingualism is recognized, it is also important to note that the degree of monolingualism observed in Korea is indeed stronger than most other countries in the world. Majority of Koreans are rarely in regular contact with speakers of languages other than Korean, and virtually all aspects of their lives are conducted in Korean. Thus, while the presence of minority languages in Korea should be acknowledged, Korea should be considered a highly monolingual nation at least in comparison to other nations. The global spread of English, however, presents of some questions regarding the status of this monolingual vision of Korea. As we will discuss later in this chapter, Korea has been in heavy pursuit of English for over half a century, and English has permeated many aspects of Koreans’ lives as a symbol and vehicle for globally circulated cultural forms and ideas. What does this mean for the ideological construction of Korea as a monolingual nation? Is the penetration of English into Korean society significant enough to question the assumptions of monolingualism? Should this be seen as evidence of the local hegemony of English? In this section, we will address these questions by considering two phenomena that are often discussed as having the potential of altering the status of English in Korea: the increasing presence of English in the media and popular culture, and the growing familiarity towards the English language among Korean speakers.

1.1. English in the media and popular culture Just as it has been customary in popular and scholarly descriptions of cultural globalization, observers of Korean society frequently note the strong presence of English in various domains, particularly that of the media and popular culture. For instance, English can be found not only in films, pop music, magazines or books imported from English-speaking countries, but also in cultural products produced in Korea. For many people, this is undeniable proof of the global spread

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of English and evidence that the traditional image of Korea as a linguistically and culturally homogeneous society is disintegrating. In this section, we will survey some earlier studies that describe the extent of the spread of English in these domains and discuss the implication of such presence of English in more detail. The strong influence of English in mass media and popular culture has been well documented in previous research. For example, the use of English in commercial advertisements of various forms (including billboards and outdoor advertisements) has been a topic of numerous studies. A study by Choe, Gim and Baek (1992) shows that 39.3% of the business signs at shopping centers in Gwangju (a major city in the Jeonla province) were in foreign languages, 70.4% of which were English. A more recent work by Lee Ju-haeng (2000) shows that over 50% of the business signs in the upscale Gangnam district of Seoul were in foreign languages, and over 60% of those were in English. In print media, Jung (2001) shows a gradual increase in the mixture of English into product names and attention-getters in magazine advertisements, particularly since the 1990s. Television commercials are also a highly visible domain for English, and Jamie Lee (2006) observes that over 80% of her corpus of television commercials recorded during weekend primetime adopt some usage of English, either in written or spoken mode, but usually a mixture of both. English is also used in various product brand names and corporate names. In recent years, many major Korean corporations changed their names to English (or at least Englishsounding) names, often with Romanized representations, rather than Korean characters, or Hangeul. For example, Pohang Jecheol ‘Pohang Iron Manufacturing’, one of the world’s largest steel producers, was officially renamed Posco (through shortening of Pohang Iron and Steel Company). Similarly, Korea’s largest telecommunication company Hanguk Tongsin ‘Korea Telecommunications’ became simply KT. English also appears frequently through newspapers and television programs. Lim Gyu-hong (2003), in analyzing the use of English in newspaper section headings, reports that 42.6% of them are entirely made of foreign words (most of which are English, such as New Biz & Job, Car Life, and Food & Fitness), and that 19.4% of all headings are also written in the Roman alphabet. In a similar study of television program titles, Lim Gyu-hong (2004) shows that 61% include foreign words, and 25.8% are exclusively in foreign words (such as Sports Magazine, Comedy House, Morning Wide and Hey! Hey! Hey!). Finally, Korean pop music is another extremely salient area of popular culture which is frequently commented upon when discussing the influence of English on Korea, as many artists adopt English stage names and mix English lyrics into their songs. Jamie Lee (2004, 2007) shows how songs of Korean pop artists use a wide range

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of English mixing, from word-level mixing of Koreanized English words to more extensive use of English and adoption of African American English features. To an observer of Korean culture, then, there appears to be sufficient evidence that English has a strong influence on Korean society. Indeed, such observations – prevalence of English language billboards and mixture of English into local pop music in a non-English-speaking nation – are some of the images that are most frequently evoked to illustrate the globalization of English. However, we should also be careful in considering the precise nature of such presence of English. Crowded streets of Seoul overlooked by huge luminous billboards plastered with English phrases and Korean musicians rapping away in English at hot underground clubs make excellent vignettes of globalization, and they indeed illuminate an important aspect of the global spread of English – but they are also only part of the story, and for this reason, should not become a fixation in our observation and study of English in Korea. First of all, such widespread use of English in the domain of popular culture does not necessarily tell us how deeply English penetrates the everyday experiences of Koreans and how such processes might take place. It is especially important to note that the presence of English in popular culture is not always reflected in Koreans’ everyday spoken language use. For instance, a corpusbased study of Korean college students’ language use by Yim and Ahn (2004) shows that the frequency of English-based words account for only 1.49% of the whole corpus they analyzed. Most of those English words are now highly Koreanized nouns such as keompyuteo ‘computer’, telebi ‘television’, beoseu ‘bus’, and inteones ‘Internet’ for which there are no Korean equivalents, and while the authors found instances of conversational phrases such as thank you and oh my god, it is doubtful that these represent an active use of English by Koreans. Also, even though newspaper section titles and television program titles are often phrased in English, it is also true that the language of the news and television media is still virtually monolingual in Korean; for instance, Moon (2001) shows that while the use of English loanwords in Korean newspaper texts has been gradually increasing over the past decades, they still account for only a small percentage of the total word count from the texts, especially if we exclude proper names. Of course, several English-based media do exist in Korea, but they do not represent the typical form of media that most Koreans are exposed to. There are two major English-language daily newspapers, Korea Times and Korea Herald, but their readership consists primarily of expatriates in Korea or those who use the papers for purposes of English study (for instance, the Korea Herald’s operator, Herald Media, also runs a large chain of English language schools). Arirang TV is a (more recent) cable television network whose content is in English, but again, its target audience is primarily expatriates in

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Korea and international viewers. Global networks such as CNN or HBO are also available in English through subscription-based cable television, but their market share in Korea is still relatively small. Foreign films showing in Korea, many of which are in the English language, are always screened with Korean subtitles. Because of these facts, the use of English in popular culture may be seen as playing a largely symbolic role. Studies on contexts similar to Korea (for example, Haarmann 1986 and Loveday 1996 on Japan) have claimed that such usage of English can be seen as projecting an image of being modern, hip, sleek, or elegant, etc., that is associated with a cosmopolitan image, but not necessarily providing a description that is meant to be literally communicated. But the fact that English plays a symbolic role probably does not mean that such English is completely meaningless to Korean consumers with respect to their content. Indeed, researchers such as Jamie Lee (2004) have argued that the English language in Korean pop music is actively adopted as a means for self-expression, with the hybridity of language mixing strategically used as a way of negotiating between the conflicting discourses of identity the artists are exposed to. For this reason, it is important to question what exactly does English in popular culture and mass media index, and what are the processes by which such indexicality is achieved. But at the same time, in understanding the implication of widespread use of English in pop culture and mass media, it still remains crucial to take into consideration the fact that the presence of English in popular culture shows a discrepancy with that in more mundane language use. It would be problematic to simply consider this a matter of a “lag” in everyday language use with popular culture leading the shift towards English. Language in popular culture is indeed subject to different processes of production, as it is closely tied with the structures of the culture industry and its complex material interests, as well as being conceived of as an ideologically distinct site from common language use (Park and Wee 2008). For this reason, drawing a fuller picture of the meaning of English within Korean society requires observation of the status of English in other discursive sites as well and cannot be based on the impression gained from mass media and popular culture alone.

1.2. The impact of language learning: growing familiarity towards English Another issue to think about in considering the notion of Korea as monolingual is the influence of English language learning. As we will discuss below, English has always been pursued in modern Korea as a valuable language, and English

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The English language in South Korea: History, politics, and sociolinguistics

language teaching has been a part of the national curriculum for a long time. As of 2008, English is taught as a mandatory subject from elementary school (3rd grade) to high school, and since a large percentage of Koreans attend high school and many seek further formal education as well as private English instruction, most Koreans can be thought of as having at least some exposure to English language learning. While we will outline in greater detail the changes in national educational policy and the boom in English language learning in section 2 below, this widespread learning of English may be thought of as an important influence in affecting the monolingual status of Korean society. What precisely is the impact of English language learning in Korea, then? While I have critically reviewed the work of Baik and Shim in chapter 1, another claim that they make is worth mentioning in this context: that there is an emerging “Korean-English bilingual community” in Korea (Shim 1994: 227). According to Baik and Shim, two factors contributed to the formation of this bilingual community. The first is the population of American-educated Korean elites who returned to Korea and took up important positions as leaders after the 1960s. Baik argues that their presence in Korea is important not only as the first group of Korean-English “bilinguals” but also because their language use had a significant impact on the Englishization of Korean (Baik 1992: 25). The second is the establishment of systematic English teaching through public schools. Shim argues that, based on the years of English language teaching provided by public education and on a rough estimate of the number of people graduating from high school, at least 50 percent of Koreans between the age of 15 and 40 should be considered bilinguals (1994: 237). Baik and Shim’s identification of these groups as “bilinguals,” along with their claims of increased use of code-mixing and Englishization of Korean, leads them to argue that language shift towards increased English usage is occurring. To quote Shim, “the increase in the number of Korean-English bilinguals has had an unprecedented influence on the manner and mode of communication in Korea. It is no longer an eyebrow-raising event to hear young Koreans talking among themselves in English in a plush caf´e in the midst of Seoul, while the background music is English hard-rock or rap” (1994: 227). Even though there can be no doubt that the influence of English on Korean society has been growing over the past several decades, Baik and Shim’s characterization of the Korean sociolinguistic situation can be misleading. It is obviously true that there are many Koreans who have considerable fluency in English as well as Korean (either through learning it as a foreign language or through experience of living overseas), and even more Koreans who can speak at least some amount of English. But it is probably not the case that those people are leading a massive shift in the direction of English-Korean bilingualism,

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contrary to the impression a reader may get from reading Baik and Shim’s work. More than a decade after Baik and Shim’s writings, Korea’s pursuit of English has intensified even more than what they have described, but it still remains true that active usage of English is more or less contained within specific linguistic domains such as popular culture, rather than spreading further to dominate all aspects of Korean language use. Of course, Baik and Shim are very careful not to unduly restrict the meaning of bilingualism, as their definition of a bilingual “includes everyone who has even a limited proficiency of the second language” (Shim 1994: 237–8) – so careful to the extent that Song critically comments that “the concept of bilingualism is rendered vacuous” (1998: 269; also see Moon 2001). While such a definition may not be analytically sophisticated, it does have the benefit of acknowledging the multivocalic nature of our linguistic life and how “everyone is bilingual” (Edwards 2004: 7); that is, Koreans’ language use clearly and inevitably involves elements from multiple language varieties that they come into contact every day. But despite such an open definition, Baik and Shim appear to believe that there are also a large number of Koreans who confidently demonstrate combined monolingual competence in both English and Korean (i.e., what is commonly called a “balanced bilingual”), a suspicion that is strengthened through the examples of code-mixing the authors present and their characterization of themselves, their family and colleagues as “proficient bilinguals” (Baik and Shim 1998: 277). Apparently, it is Baik and Shim’s belief that these people are leading a massive language shift away from monolingualism in Korean. But the real question here is not whether there are Koreans who are fluent speakers or not; there can be no doubt that there are many Koreans who are proficient speakers of English. The more important issue is how such competence is socially viewed and accepted. For instance, public displays of English language skills are subject to ideological interpretation, and in Korean context, there are language ideologies that work against openly demonstrating one’s proficiency in English. Indeed, we may argue that it is precisely such ideologies that construct Korea as a monolingual society despite the existence of many speakers who are also competent in English and other languages. As I will show later in this book, it would certainly be “eyebrow-raising” to the majority of Koreans – that is, a commentable observation – if they encountered another group of Koreans chatting away in English. To be sure, it may not be a scene that they have never seen before; but it would immediately set those speakers apart as being different from other “ordinary” Koreans in some way, triggering interpretations about their social background, identity, or perhaps even personality. In this sense, a scene of Koreans publicly displaying their competence in English in an unreserved manner is clearly not an unremarkable sight. More importantly,

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The English language in South Korea: History, politics, and sociolinguistics

whether most Koreans, even those who have considerable fluency in English, would openly acknowledge themselves to be proficient bilinguals, like Baik and Shim do, is highly questionable. It becomes less meaningful, then, to argue whether the massive and systematic emphasis on English language learning has transformed Koreans into bilinguals or not. Given that the distinction between monolinguality and bilinguality must be conceived as a continuum, such questions can only be answered in relative terms anyway (Ellis 2006). What is more important for our purposes is to understand how Koreans conceptualize their relationship to English and whether the projects of English language learning has altered such conceptualizations in some way. Discursive construction of linguistic competence is a central way through which such a relationship is mediated, so the tension between projecting oneself as monolingual and claiming bilingual fluency becomes an important window through which we can interrogate the language ideological forces that constitute those speakers’ linguistic world view. In that case, we would naturally want to view such tensions and the concomitant ambivalences as a crucial aspect of Korean metalinguistic discourse, rather than as noise that interferes with categorization of Koreans as either monolinguals or bilinguals. In sum, we can conclude that, while the status of English in the formal education system or its salient presence in popular culture should not distract us from the fact that Korean society is still largely monolingual in many ways, Korea’s status as a monolingual society must be understood as a discursive construct. The perception of Korea as a monolingual country involves erasure (Irvine and Gal 2000) of certain sociolinguistic aspects of Korean society, ranging from the presence of linguistic minorities to the English language competence of many Korean speakers. It is significant in this regard that a great majority of Koreans perceive themselves to be monolinguals, regardless of actual patterns of language use in Korean society. This should not be seen as a simple reflection of national ideologies imposed upon Koreans through education and language policy. Nor should it be dismissed as a reflection of Koreans’ “modesty” or “lack of confidence” which allegedly causes them to deny their English competence. The way Koreans project themselves as monolinguals by distancing themselves from English should be seen as an important mechanism that creates the image of Korea as a monolingual society – and also one that gives shape to the meaning of English in Korea. The following chapters will discuss this effect in more detail.

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2. Korea in pursuit of English: global aspirations and local struggles English in Korea is a much sought-after resource. English is seen nowadays as an important key for success, and the lack of English skills is seen as a crucial handicap in the competitive Korean society. English has always been considered a key to upward social mobility since the late 19th century when the first schools for English language teaching were opened in Korea. The importance of English, however, became more evident and directly relevant to the majority of Koreans in 1945, when Japanese colonial rule ended and United States troops moved into the southern half of the Korean Peninsula to establish a transitional military government. At that time, the importance of English was felt on many different levels of society; for the poor children on the streets, the ability to memorize and repeat phrases such as “give me chocolate” was rewarded with pieces of candy; for the small number of elites who had the experience of studying in the United States, their ability to speak English provided them with prestigious jobs in the military government, which was also called tongyeok jeongbu ‘translation government’ due to the fact that Korean translators played an important role in mediating between American military personnel and the Korean public (Go 1995). It is no coincidence that the first Korean president, Syngman Rhee, who came into power when a native Korean government was established in the southern half of the peninsula in 1947, was a pro-American politician fluent in English. The importance of his English can be illustrated by the fact that he “went to missionary schools like Pai Chai less for their Christianity than to look for political position through English” (Henderson 1968: 207, cited in Cumings 1997: 157). After the establishment of the Korean government, the United States maintained its influence on South Korea as a strategic location in East Asia, and Korea’s economic and military dependence on the United States continued. Thus, throughout modern history, English increasingly became a language of importance. In this section, we will survey several domains in which English has gained prominence, to gain a better understanding of the significance of English in Korean society.

2.1. English as a national resource: economic strategies and educational policy The Korean government has consistently treated English as an important resource which would allow the country to be connected with the world and to achieve economic prosperity. Particularly since the 1980s, when Korea started

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The English language in South Korea: History, politics, and sociolinguistics

to focus on gaining international recognition and economic stability within the global market, the Korean government pushed its citizens to be more proficient in English. For instance, several major international events that Korea hosted, such as the Seoul Olympics of 1988, often served as occasions for the government to instill the importance of English among the Korean populace. The Korean government saw the Olympics as an opportunity to show Korea’s “economic, technological, cultural, and social achievements to a global audience” (Lee Chae-Jin 2000: 172), and hoped to join the league of modern developed nations by winning international recognition. Consequently, through a series of television advertisements and campaigns, all Koreans were urged to take up a mindset as citizens of just such an advanced nation and to combine efforts to successfully host these events. Within this context, the ability to interact with and make a positive impression on visiting foreigners was emphasized, including friendliness, smiling, and most importantly, speaking English. It is interesting to note that the importance of English for these sports events was emphasized so much that researchers like Baik and Shim are compelled to claim that these events had a significant direct impact on Koreans’ use of English. For example, Baik claims that a new period of contact between English was “marked by the declaration that Seoul was to be the host city for the 1986 Asian Games and the 1988 Olympic Games. Ordinary Koreans began to feel the imminent need to learn and speak English” (1992: 26). Shim writes, “these athletic events mark a significant point in the history of contact between English and Korean that brought about a totally new trend of linguistic change in Korean. The general public in many parts of Korea (e.g., taxi drivers, shopkeepers, street vendors, volunteers, etc.) were put into direct contact situations with foreigners with whom they had to communicate in English” (1994: 227). However, as Song (1998) argues, it is difficult to attribute the increased importance of English to the games themselves. Events that last just a few weeks simply cannot provide Koreans with significant exposure to English, even if they are in direct contact with English speakers during the whole period of the events; and it is probably the case that most Koreans had very little need to converse with foreigners in English, if at all, with the exception of those directly involved in the management of the games.Therefore it is unlikely that these events had an impact in drastically changing the conditions for language contact in Korea. Yet, Baik and Shim’s evaluation of the international sports events does point out how strongly the Korean government tried to use these occasions as symbolic events that represent the nation’s internationalization and how English was adopted as a salient index for that process. While the Olympics and other international events did not have an impact on changing the conditions for language contact with English per se, the government’s continuing campaigns had the

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effect of highlighting a particular ideological connection between internationalization, modernization, and English, leading Koreans (including researchers like Baik and Shim) to believe in a particular image of the global world in which Korea has now become a proud neighbor to modern, advanced nations and must learn how to communicate with them through the medium of English. Creation and circulation of such imagery by the government no doubt played an important role in how English came to be seen as an important language in Korean society. The Korean government’s emphasis on English was substantiated further through several policy decisions as well. In 1995, the government began a more focused drive towards globalization, adopting segyehwa ‘globalization’ as its slogan, and made a series of moves towards more openness and conformity to market principles in order to enhance Korea’s global competitiveness (Samuel S. Kim 2000). Again, English figured prominently in this drive, being underlined as a crucial resource that would allow Korea to communicate with the rest of the world. For example, in order to establish the country as an economic hub of the East Asian region, the government developed several regions as special economic zones that could lure foreign companies and investors. In 2001, the southern island of Jeju was designated as a free international city, and in 2002, the regions of Inchoen, Busan, and Gwangyang were designated as free economic zones. To attract foreign investors and capital flow, various incentives, such as tax breaks and deregulation of employment and labor laws, were provided, and new facilities, including airports and seaports, were developed. Another type of support that was widely promoted was that of language; for the convenience of foreign investors, administrative services are offered in English as well as Korean. This move shows that English is strategically seen as a resource that has clear economic value; government officials made explicit their hope that more foreign investment would flow into the area if foreign companies could conduct their business with Korean governmental offices in English (Son 2001). Bolstering the status of English in the free economic zones was not limited to the area of official business. Plans were proposed to strengthen the English skills of local residents of the regions as well, including proposals to allow local students to attend international schools and to introduce English immersion programs for non-English subjects in public schools. These proposals were often discussed using the term yeongeo inpeula ‘English infra(structure)’, implying that the English language is equivalent to a material base (such as transportation systems or financial networks) which can synergistically facilitate economic development. The Korean government underlined the connection between English and globalization through its national education policy as well. For instance, through

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the 6th National Curricula, which were implemented in 1995 for middle schools and in 1996 for high schools, coinciding with the beginning of Korea’s globalization drive, a shift in English language teaching took place, moving away from the previous emphasis on grammatical knowledge and accuracy toward communicative language use and fluency. Consequently, the pre-service teacher education program was also modified significantly to focus on communicative and pedagogical skills, instead of focusing on structural and theoretical knowledge of English (Kwon 2000; Shin 2007). This move was followed by more radical and controversial policy decisions. In the 7th National Curricula, which were implemented in 1997, mandatory English language education started to begin at an earlier age, at third grade in elementary school, four years earlier than the previous policy had mandated, officializing the trend known as yeongeo jogi gyoyuk (early English education) (Jung and Norton 2002; Lee Jiyoon 2004). Improving the communicative competence of students was explicitly cited as the goal of such move, as a Ministry of Education document that explains the motivation for this policy claims: “introducing English education at the elementary school level is based on the discussion that communicative competence is an essential condition in order to exchange ideas and information with foreigners. In order to satisfy this goal, English should be taught at young ages for the long-term effectiveness of language learning” (Ministry of Education 1997: 2, cited in Lee Jiyoon 2004: 84). While reducing the starting age of mandatory English language learning is a worldwide trend (Enever 2007), it is also a controversial one, and there has been much debate in Korea on the value and efficacy of such measures for improving competence in English. However, despite such controversy, the government announced through the second National Human Resources Development Plan revealed on January 2006 that it will experiment with English language teaching at first grade in elementary school at a limited number of schools, stating that if the outcomes are positive, the new starting age would be implemented in all schools (Heo 2006b). Similarly, medium of instruction is also an important issue in government policy, as the government has been increasingly pressuring English teachers to teach exclusively in English. In January 2008, the Presidential Transition Committee for the newly elected Korean president Lee Myung-bak announced that by 2012 all English classes in primary and secondary schools will be conducted only in English (Gang 2008). In addition, the chairperson for the committee, Lee Kyung-sook, caused a huge controversy by stating that the committee is also considering teaching non-English subjects in English as well, so that “all high school graduates would be able to speak English as a result of their public education” (No 2008). While the transition committee quickly withdrew its plan for

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using English in non-English classes after facing severe criticism (Eom 2008), examples like these show how using English as the medium of instruction is seen as an important resource for boosting students’ competence in English (see also section 2.2 on the issue of using English as medium of instruction in higher education). The preference for English-only instruction in national policy is problematic for several reasons. One consequence, for example, is that the teachers come to be evaluated more for their proficiency in English rather than their qualifications, and such policies have been criticized by researchers who argue that this does not acknowledge the expertise of non-native speaker teachers, whose bilingual experience can be an invaluable resource for language teaching (see Shin Hyungjung 2006, 2007 for a detailed discussion). In addition, the use of Korean in English classrooms can be an effective resource for instruction, as studies have shown that, despite teachers’ self-perceived lack of competence to conduct English-only classes, their patterns of code-switching may contribute to student comprehension through explaining difficult terms or providing background information (Liu et al. 2004). This suggests that the government’s push for English-only classes will remain to be controversial; but at the same time, the government’s pursuit of such policy in spite of contestation illustrates its strong desire to secure English as a national resource for global competition. All of the changes discussed above – emphasis on communication, earlier exposure to English, and English-only instruction – were introduced with the hope that they would increase the English proficiency of Koreans, making Korea more competitive in the international market. As we will see below, this instrumentalist approach to language policy had a strong impact on the status of English in other domains, and also received further justification by those other domains, contributing to the power of English in Korean society.

2.2. English as a modern skill: higher education and the job market The government’s emphasis on English as a necessary resource for Korea’s survival in the global world was also reflected in the growing importance of English in higher education and the job market. While English has always been an important school subject in the Korean education system, this importance was further accentuated as the government suggested international competitiveness as an ideal for universities, and as schools came to see enhancing students’ competence in English as an important part of their preparation for the job market.

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In the late 1990s, many universities started to require students to achieve a certain score or higher on standardized English tests such as TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) or TOEIC (Test of English for International Communication), produced and administered by the Educational Testing Service of the U.S., for both college entrance and graduation – and those minimum scores have been rising over the years. “It may be a burden for the students, but in this age of internationalization and globalization, TOEIC and TOEFL are now more important than any other core courses,” one university staff member is reported to say in a newspaper article (Bak 1995). Universities also emphasize English by expanding the currency of the language. Many universities strongly encourage faculty members to lecture in English by rewarding those who offer courses in English with research funds and reduced teaching loads. Korea University, one of the elite institutions located in Seoul, and well known for its aggressive globalization drive, is a prominent example; as of 2006, it is reported that more than 30% of its courses offered are taught in English (Jeong 2006). Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, one of Korea’s leading schools of science and engineering, is also pursuing a relentless globalization project, and from 2007 started to teach all freshman courses in English only (Shin and Yi 2007). This is perhaps a consequence of the fact that English skills have become an important criterion for decisions regarding employment in the white-collar job market. Applicants for major corporations and employees up for promotion are often regularly screened for their English competence in some way. For instance, TOEIC has been the test of choice for corporations in hiring new workers ever since traditional written examinations testing knowledge in one’s major area and “common knowledge” (sangsik) were abandoned in the mid 1990s. During this era, when the Korean government initiated its globalization drive, Korean conglomerates also started to seek overseas markets more aggressively for their further growth, as exemplified by the catchphrase segye gyeongyeong ‘world management’ of Daewoo, one of the major family-owned-and-controlled business conglomerates, or jaebeols. Adoption of tests such as TOEIC can be seen as part of the changes Korean companies sought as they invested in more active global expansion. Such standardized English test scores were adopted because they were believed to be a better indicator of communicative competence than traditional school-based English tests which focused more on grammatical knowledge. But during the mid-2000s, even such test scores came to be distrusted, and an increasing number of companies try to adopt more direct ways of observing an applicant’s communicative competence, through methods such as interviews or group discussions conducted in English (Han 2003; Gim 2005). What is re-

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markable here is that such tests of English skills are often conducted regardless of the nature of the person’s job description. Studies on usage of English in the workplace have continuously shown that despite the emphasis on English in business culture there has actually been little active English language use related to work (McTague 1990; Choi 2002; Park and Jung 2006). Nonetheless, a vast majority of office workers in major corporations are subject to various English tests throughout their career. For example, Choi (2002) shows that over 90% of workers in large private manufacturing and exporting industries are continuously tested for their English during employment. The fact that such English scores are needed regardless of whether a person’s job actually involves English or not shows how the ideological construction of English as a symbol of global connection plays a prominent role here. English skills are not simply seen as one of various valuable skills, but a fundamental part of what defines an injae ‘human talent/talented person’ desired by today’s corporations. For example, in a newspaper article reporting on trends in the job market, several personnel managers at major corporations all mention in one form or another that the type of person they are looking for is a gukjein ‘an international’, which they in turn define as a person who has an openness and understanding towards other cultures, insights about the world economy, ability to analyze one’s position within the world, and finally, the ability to communicate well on the international stage (Gweon and Bak 2001). Statements like these point to the idea that the ideal employee of a globally oriented corporation must be globally oriented as well, a quality that is indexed through the person’s English skills. In other words, English is not the kind of skill whose lack may be compensated by other skills, but something more fundamental to the desired corporate worker in the global age.

2.3. The boom in English language learning The emphasis on English in higher education and the job market clearly demonstrates that English in Korea is valuable linguistic capital in a very practical sense. Combined with the competitiveness of the Korean education system in general (Seth 2002), the great significance placed on English creates some problems, particularly in the area of English education for children. As in other East Asian countries, parents view education of children as of paramount importance, as it is seen as providing the children with the prestige and resources they will need to make a good living as adults. Because of this reason, many parents go to great lengths to ensure that their children get the right education and outdo others. Given the heavy emphasis on the English language, it thus becomes all

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the more important for them to make significant investments so that they can secure good opportunities for their children to learn English. Despite numerous reforms in the national curriculum (see the discussion above in section 2.1), most parents do not believe that school instruction alone will provide their children with the English competence necessary for a successful life. This is for several reasons. Some consider the limited hours of instruction inadequate, and others believe starting to learn English in elementary school is too late for developing native-like proficiency. It may also be a reflection of parents’ general distrust towards the formal education system, which (they feel) failed to help them grow into fluent English speakers. But it is also the strong fear and anxiety that other children might get ahead of their own in their acquisition of English that drive parents to relentlessly pursue better opportunities for English education. This general distrust and anxiety, combined with Korea’s massive and complex private after-school education market, produce various modes of English language learning opportunities for children that form an estimated $3.3 billion market (Park and Abelmann 2004). Options for after-school English instruction include hakseupji (‘worksheet’) programs (which consist of working on practice questions on worksheets supplemented with regular guidance by a worksheet teacher), private English institutes, and individual or group tutoring. Especially since the introduction of English as an elementary school subject in 1997, the private English education market has been booming. The sector which caters to pre-elementary school children is particularly heated, as many parents believe it is crucial to give their children a head start. For example, English-only kindergartens (yeongeo yuchiwon) with native-speaker staff which are often twice or three times more expensive than regular kindergartens are nonetheless thriving; in some cases, entering such kindergartens can be highly competitive. These places are popular because it is believed that early exposure to English and native-speaker teachers is critical in helping children achieve “native-like” English competence. Another option sought by parents is to send their children overseas. In addition to eohak yeonsu ‘(short term) English study abroad,’ increasingly common is jogi yuhak ‘early overseas education,’ in which children are sent abroad for a longer term (two to three years or longer), often to the United States or other English-speaking countries, at their early teens or even earlier, in hope that being exposed to an environment where English is spoken on an everyday basis will give them native-speaker-like fluency. This is not an option that can be chosen lightly, for it results in separation of families (typical arrangement is either to send the child to boarding school or to a guardian, or for the mother to accompany the child while the father stays behind to work and provide for the cost of

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living overseas) as well as a great financial burden (Cho 2007). Some justify jogi yuhak by arguing that enrolling a child in private after-school programs in Korea is so costly that sending children overseas is actually not a bad deal; but of course it is still the case that only the relatively wealthy can afford to entertain the idea. Nonetheless, such costs are often seen as a necessary investment for the child’s future, and jogi yuhak is on the rise. According to one report, the number of primary and secondary school students studying abroad has increased more than ten times during the period between 1998 and 2004 (Heo 2006a). The jogi yuhak boom is also tied to the emergence of special high schools (teuksu mokjeok godeunghakgyo) and autonomous private schools (jaliphyeong salip godeunghakgyo) as new prestigious elite schools. Initially these schools were established to provide an alternative mode of education with specialized curricula that focus on certain areas such as science or foreign language; but under the policy of equalization (pyeongjunhwa), in which ranking of high schools has been banned since the 1970s, such schools are nowadays seen as the door to prestigious universities in Korea and overseas, and a large portion of the private after-school education market specializes in preparing students for entrance to these highly selective secondary schools (Bak et al. 2007). Special high schools and autonomous private schools contribute to the emphasis on English in the educational market because some of them (such as the Korean Minjok Leadership Academy (Minjok Sagwan Godeunghakgyo) and Cheongshim International Academy) are known to teach in English, strengthening the ideological link between English and prestigious opportunities. Also, most of such schools require high TOEFL or TOEIC scores and good English conversational skills as admission criteria. For this reason, many parents consider experience of studying overseas as an absolute prerequisite for entering these schools (Choe 2006); according to some reports, nearly half of the students admitted to certain schools have had some experience of studying overseas (Chosun Ilbo 2007). Of course, this connection between jogi yuhak and specialized schools privileges students with affluent backgrounds; a high percentage of students that are admitted to special high schools come from wealthy households and from more upscale regions of Seoul (Yi 2006), supporting the public’s perception of them as elite schools. Issues like these make clear that the aspect of class closely intersects the issue of English in Korea (Park and Abelmann 2004). More affluent members of Korean society have more resources and connections to send their children to costly English kindergartens or abroad, which in turn may provide them with a better chance at securing better jobs, thus reproducing and strengthening the class difference in the same way the education system reproduces class relations while maintaining an appearance of meritocracy (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977).

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Indeed, Koreans are strongly aware of this unequal distribution of resources and its potential consequences; efforts such as jogi yuhak, for example, are often criticized as contributing to the reproduction of class relations and social inequalities. But at the same time, such awareness further drives parents’ zeal to secure better opportunities for children’s English language learning, because such inequalities paradoxically serve as “proof” that English is a crucial key for upward mobility. In this sense, both parents and children are locked in a vicious cycle of the pursuit of English.

2.4. The politics of ‘English villages’ The intersection of class anxiety and pursuit of English is saliently demonstrated in the politics surrounding the recent boom in the construction of “English villages.” English villages are establishments that allow students (children and adults alike) to learn and practice English in an immersion environment without leaving the country. They simulate an English-speaking society complete with shops, restaurants, police stations, banks, and hospitals, where vendors or workers are native speakers. Visitors may enroll in longer boarding programs which range from five days to up to a month to live in one of the villages and take classes, or may make daytrips to these establishments to interact with native speakers at souvenir shops or restaurants. Though their main clientele is younger children (upper primary to lower secondary students), English villages also offer programs targeted at adults, sometimes designed to meet their specific needs (such as preparation for job interviews in English). English villages are established by city or province governments, though the development and operation of educational programs are usually contracted out to commercial English language institutes; major players in the Korean English language teaching market such as Herald Media or YBM Education run several English villages around the country (Gyeong and Gim 2007). While specific programs offered differ, most English villages aim not only to provide their students with an experience of being immersed in English but also to make that experience fun. At Ansan English village in Gyeonggi Province, for example, teenage students interact with native-speaker teachers as they engage in activities such as cooking and drama (Gim 2006a). The underlying assumption behind English villages is that Koreans cannot speak English well because they do not live in an environment in which English is used on a daily basis; thus, these emulated spaces of English are supposed to address this problem by providing an environment in which visitors are “forced” to speak English with native speakers – though in reality much slippage occurs as

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Korean creeps into talk now and then (Bak 2006; Gim and Yu 2007). That these facilities are meant to provide a sharp break from Koreans’ linguistic environment is most clearly reflected in the fact that visitors to the English villages must go through “immigration checkpoints,” where they fill in immigration cards and are interviewed by a native speaker “immigration officer” (Faiola 2004). That is, English villages are envisioned as English-speaking islands where Koreans can escape the bounds of their monolingual culture – though into a monolingual culture of another kind, that of the English-speaking West (see also Shin Hyungjung 2006). This imagined distinction is also manifest in the way the villages are constructed as “authentic.” For instance, the premises of Gyeonggi Province’s Paju English village, one of the largest in operation, are a Disneyland-esque mimicry of a British town, with a central city square, tram, Dickensian lamp posts, and buildings that are designed as a pastiche of Victorian, Neoclassical, Georgian, and Gothic elements, reflecting an assumption that an authentic Englishspeaking experience must be located in the West. Such presuppositions are also the basis for the selection of native-speaker teachers, who are primarily white speakers recruited from Western countries such as the U.S., Canada, Australia, etc. (rather than non-white speakers from those countries or speakers from nonWestern countries such as South East Asia, for instance). This bias extends the belief that such “native speakers” are best equipped to teach English and to serve as the sole model for English usage, which dominates Korean conceptions of English and the English language teaching profession in general (see Shin 2007). English villages are thus products of particular ideologies of English, and as such are deeply embedded in a politics of language that permeates Korean society. English villages are political in a more overt sense as well. The construction of English villages has become extremely popular among regional governments. While the first English village opened its door in August 2004 in Ansan, Gyeonggi Province, by 2006 at least 8 villages were in operation, with more than 10 new ones being proposed (Gim and Hwang 2006). For regional governments, English villages are useful not only because of their symbolic value (they may be seen as representing a global aspiration that balances their localness) but also for political reasons, as English villages are often advertised as a populist alternative to costly jogi yuhak that allows everyone access to an “effective” English language learning experience. In fact, English villages were a political artifact from their very first conceptualization. They were first proposed during the 2002 nation-wide election of city and province officials by two prominent candidates, one of whom was Son Hak-gyu, conservative Grand National Party’s candidate for the governor’s

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seat of Gyeonggi Province. His pledge to build English villages in the province was explicitly aimed at voters who may have felt disgruntled that they were not able to provide adequately for their children by sending them overseas. On June 3, 2002, a newspaper advertisement by Son’s campaign began with a quotation in large type (from an imagined dialogue between parents concerned about their child’s education), “Dear, I heard our neighbor’s child is going overseas for English study...” The main text, in Korean, read: Dear parents of Gyeonggi!You are worried about your children’s education, aren’t you? I traveled all over Gyeonggi Province and met many people. Of course the biggest concern for parents was the education of their children, particularly their English education. Sending your child overseas is too costly, and not sending your child breaks your heart... I promise: I will build English villages where one can live with foreigners speaking only English, so that your children can receive English education that is as practical as sending them overseas.

Examples like this show that class anxiety is pervasive enough to be explicitly politicized, and that English villages were invented specifically to tap into this anxiety for political gain. (In the case of Son, this turned out to be a successful strategy, as he won the governor’s seat in the election.) However, the operation of English villages is not without problems. In 2006, the two villages run by Gyeonggi province, located at Ansan and Paju, for example, had a deficit of $22 million, mainly because of the exorbitant cost of construction and maintenance, but also because of low usage by citizens; it is reported that only 3.6% of the elementary and middle school students in Gyeonggi province have attended the villages (Hong 2006a). There may be various reasons for this lack of interest. On the one hand, for low-income households, the price of admission may not necessarily be cheap. Even though English villages were touted as affordable alternatives to studying overseas, their fees have been on the rise due to the strained financial conditions of the villages. While Gyeonggi province stated that they would reserve 20% of admissions for children from low-income families and provide them with full financial support, only 4.8% of attendees come from that group (Hong 2006b). On the other hand, for people who can afford to send their children to prestigious English language schools that have native-speaker teachers or even to send them on jogi yuhak, English villages may not be an attractive option because they do not give their attendees an edge in the competition to get ahead of others (Gim 2006b). Ultimately, Koreans strive to learn English for the symbolic capital it offers rather than for linguistic competence per se. Jogi yuhak, for instance, serves as a valuable index of social status because only privileged people can afford it, and also because it

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offers an aura of cosmopolitanism. In contrast, English villages do not carry the symbolic prestige of studying overseas, and for this reason may never be seen as a viable alternative to jogi yuhak. Thus, regardless of whether English villages become financially stable or not, it may be difficult for them to solve the problems of inequity that they initially purported to address. This is because the Korean English frenzy is not a dilemma that can be quelled by provision of accessible opportunities for English language learning; it is a result of anxieties that are much deeply rooted in issues of class, power, and social structure.

2.5. Class, symbolic capital, and language ideology The politics of English as we outlined above clearly show that English should be seen as an index of class and a resource for class mobility. However, the precise way in which English in Korea serves as an index of class requires more careful consideration. We may think about this question by rephrasing it: Does the ability to use English serve as a class marker in Korean society? In a sense, the answer is yes. The ability to use English in a competent, communicative way may index the speaker as a member of the more privileged class by pointing to the resources and opportunities that must have enabled his or her successful acquisition of English. But in another sense, it should be noted that there are considerable ideological forces that work to conceal this indexicality, and that because of this, the connection between English competence and social class becomes less straightforward than it may appear to be. This is because what constitutes good English competence is itself subject to language ideological interpretation, so there can never be a clearly defined point one may reach to qualify as a competent speaker of English and become a member of the privileged class. The validity of purported indexes of mastery of English, such as TOEIC, for instance, is a matter of constant contestation – not only by people who must subject themselves to the test for education and employment, but also by those who adopted it as an index in the first place. Emphasis on TOEIC scores over the past several years has produced many job applicants who get a perfect score on the test, yet there still remains dissatisfaction on the part of major corporations, who complain that even employees with high TOEIC scores cannot communicate effectively in English – and, as I discussed above, this has led to a decline in the popularity of TOEIC recently, with companies seeking alternative means of testing English competence such as interviews conducted in English (Han 2003; Gim 2005). That high test scores on TOEIC

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do not necessarily indicate communicative fluency should be no surprise to specialists in language assessment, of course, but the point here is that what counts as evidence of good competence is a matter of ideological construction, and therefore is bound up with reproduction of power and interests. The constant redefinition of criteria for good English competence, in effect, amounts to a specific kind of mechanism for the mystification of the process of selection (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977). English is presented as a key for class mobility in the global age, but in reality, pursuing the purported indexes of English competence does not provide such opportunity in itself. Korean workers are lured by the promise that English offers – but at the same time, they are continuously denied that promise by being told their English will never be good enough. By claiming that employees with high test scores still cannot speak English, Korean corporations are able to conceal the structural inequalities of the selection process and maintain the image of meritocracy, while getting precisely what they wanted: workers who have made greater investments in acquiring English. Instead, the problem in the selection process is attributed to two things: limits of the instruments of assessment (which lead employers to promote alternative means) and – more importantly to our discussion – that their employees (and future ones) just can’t speak English. This latter point is worth elaborating, because, while it comments on Koreans’ incompetence in English, it is stated in generalized terms rather than focusing on a specific class of potential workers; if anything, it comments on the English ability of young, recent college graduates, who would be expected to have better English competence than any other age group of Koreans due to their recent and focused exposure to English language learning. If English competence is claimed to provide class mobility but these young people’s English is not good enough, then presumably there is no one who can move up the ladder. This picture is even more complicated by the fact that, in the belief of Koreans, even members of the higher social class are not necessarily equated with fluent speakers of English. That is, while upper class social background may serve as an explanation for why someone might speak English well, being a member of the upper class does not always serve as a guarantee for having good English skills. For instance, there are frequent complaints in the media about how the sub-standard English competence of higher-level government officials and diplomats led to failure in protecting and promoting Korea’s interests in the global stage (see chapter 3 for more discussion). On the one hand, we may think of such complaints as criticism from the lower class, cynically remarking on the discrepancy in the higher-class speakers’ privileges and responsibilities. But on the other hand, it should also be noted that such complaints are commonly found in the conservative press, which frequently represents the interests of the

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privileged class, and which has been a strong promoting force for the increased emphasis on English in Korean society. This shows that the way English intersects with the issue of social class is extremely complex, and that the indexing of class through English must be considered in relation to a generalizing ideology that constructs all Koreans as lacking good English competence, an ideology that works to conceal the implications of power and class inequality from the question of English in Korea. And it seems that this ideological conceptualization of Koreans’English skills is what underlines the heated pursuit of English in Korea. Various phenomena since the 1990s which we observed in this section all appear to be motivated by the strong belief that, despite all the effort and investments made by the government and individuals, English is far out of reach for Koreans. Individuals are inculcated with discontent over their achievements in English, and for this reason are in a state of Sisyphean labor; they have invested vast quantities of time and money in learning English not only through formal education but also in private language schools, yet often feel that they still cannot speak English well, which leads them to investment even more in learning English. For this reason, English is often thought of as an emotional and financial burden, and generalizations such as “Koreans can’t speak English” abound. For parents, this is likely a major motivation which makes them try to provide whatever it takes to help their children break out of this cycle; they do not want their children to struggle with English the way they did and to lose out on opportunities that (they hope) might be seized through English, so they make great investments even though it means an even greater burden for themselves. And ultimately through such pursuit, it is the social relationships of inequality that are reproduced and rationalized. Thus, it is important to recognize how Korea’s pursuit of English is driven by an ideological understanding of Koreans’ relation to the language with respect to competence. It is this ideological construction of Koreans as bad speakers of English, and of English as a burden that nonetheless must be pursued at all costs, which will be investigated in detail throughout this book.

3. Resistance to English and language purism In the previous section, I outlined several aspects of English in contemporary Korean society which illustrate the status of English as a hegemonic language. However, this does not mean that Koreans are eager to abandon the Korean language and blindly pursue English as a language of opportunity. Such pursuit of English coexists side by side with resistance towards English, thus rendering

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Koreans’ relation to the language ambivalent. For instance, perhaps precisely because English is valuable capital, claiming ownership of the language is potentially risky, much in the same way one would typically not go about saying one makes a lot of money. Indeed, as we will discuss in later chapters, Koreans who appear to be displaying a close alignment with English by mixing English words into an otherwise monolingual conversation or by approximating a closer pronunciation to traditional native-speaker varieties would be identified by other Koreans as doing jalnan cheok ‘pretending to be smart/good, boasting,’ which is a seriously damaging evaluation of the person. (Incidentally, the literal meaning of the expression is ‘pretending to be of a good origin,’ with the implications of claiming a privileged social background that one doesn’t have.) Such evaluations may be based on a critical perspective on the class-based inequalities of English and its concomitant material consequences, according to which a desire of valued forms of language is considered an act of betrayal by those who are not supposed to have access to them. Such criticism may also be based on nationalistic grounds, through a language attitude which views English as foreign to Korean culture and society. The underlying assumption here is that the Korean language is an integral part of the Korean identity; thus an alignment with English, as valued language of a powerful Other, amounts to a disloyal act of self-denial. Nationalistic language attitudes in Korea are probably just as prominent as the heated pursuit of English. For example, parents’ efforts such as tongue surgery or jogi yuhak receive much criticism by the general public and the media, not only because they are seen as reinforcing class inequality, but also because they are considered to be indicative of a self-despising attitude which idolizes the cultural image of an Other – in this case, the United States – rather than one’s own. Therefore, while Koreans actively pursue English due to its symbolic value, they also maintain a strong nationalistic language attitude that warns against valorizing other languages more than one’s own. English is a particularly sensitive issue from a nationalistic perspective precisely because of the strong influence it has on Korea. Koreans may perceive other foreign languages as simply different from Korean, but may consider English as a language that indexes an identity against their own, because of the perception that its pervasive influence can function as a real threat. The Korean language has always played an important part in Korean nationalism, particularly in the resistance against Japanese colonial rule. Symbolic of the role of Korean in that period was the “Joseoneo Hakhoe (Korean Language Society) incident.” During the final stages of Japanese rule, the suppression of Korean language and culture was strengthened, and the use of Korean was banned; Korean was eliminated from the school curriculum, and Koreans were

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forced to convert their names into Japanese style. In this context, in 1942, members of the Joseoneo Hakhoe, linguists who had been working on standardization of Korean and publication of a Korean dictionary, were arrested and imprisoned. It is important to note that both the members of the Society and the Japanese colonizers recognized the Society’s work as directly representing an act of resistance to the colonial power; in fact, in many accounts of Korean colonial history the incident is considered to be an important chapter in the Korean independence movement. The end of Japanese rule in 1945, then, naturally led to efforts to purify Korean of the Japanese influences that had been forced upon it. Many members of the Joseoneo Hakhoe who survived the incident, such as Choe Hyeonbae, took up important positions in the newly established Korean government, and exerted considerable influence on the language policies of the new Korea (Heo 1994; Go 1995). While Japanese influence on the Korean language persisted for a few more decades, by the 1990s, purging of Japanese elements from Korean was relatively successful. Based on these roots, linguistic nationalism remains strong in Korean society. One of the most popular manifestations of this nationalism can be found in the discourses of linguistic purism. While linguistic purism in general need not be linked with linguistic nationalism, in the Korean case there happens to be a close connection between the two, as the Korean language is a particularly strong marker for Korean identity, broadly perceived as a language used by all Koreans and only by Koreans. Thus, as we will see in some examples discussed in this book (especially in chapter 3), guarding the purity of the Korean language is often equated with protecting Korean culture and identity from external forces. In Korea, language purification, or eoneo sunhwa, is a very broad notion, targeting many aspects of language such as the use of slang, “vulgar” expressions, “impolite” words, regional dialects, “incorrect” usage of grammar and spelling, new linguistic forms in computer-mediated communication, and (to more devoted purists) Chinese-based (Sino-Korean) vocabulary, as well as influence from foreign languages such as Japanese and English. Language purification campaigns in Korea are led for the most part by the government, through various efforts such as publishing guidelines that list forms to be avoided or replaced by different terms, or proposing legislation for maintaining standards of Korean language use. The fact that these campaigns appeal to the nationalist sentiment of Koreans is evident from slogans such as gukeo salang nala salang ‘love of our language is love of our country.’ The media is also an active force in promoting language purism. Most newspapers run columns that educate the readers on the “correct” usage of the Korean language, and major television companies also broadcast short but regular programs that deal with similar content. More recently, popular game

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shows (most notably Ulimal Gyeolugi ‘Our language competition’and Sangsang Plus ‘Roundtable Plus’) incorporate elements of language purism by promoting knowledge of native Korean words that are losing their currency. The academic establishment also plays an important role here, with linguists providing input to government policy, supplying information for television programs, and writing newspaper columns. Even though linguistic purism in Korea deals with more than foreign influences on Korean, the increasing influence of English in Korea over the past years has clearly played a prominent part in the perception that the Korean language is being threatened and needs to be protected. Heo (1994) underlines the anxiety towards perceived infiltration of English as an important background for purification of Korean, noting that the first major government-led language purification campaign (eoneo sunhwa undong), which started in 1976, was largely motivated by President Park Chung-Hee, who complained that there was too much “foreign language” (apparently referring to English) being used in billboards and the media (p. 178). Since other major foreign language influences (mainly from Japanese) have been mostly purged from Korean, English nowadays is the main focus for linguistic purism in the area of foreign interference. Given the increasing presence of English in Korean society, it might seem questionable whether these language purification efforts regarding English are really successful. However, the fact that institutional forces guide Korean linguistic purism does not imply that ordinary Koreans are indifferent to or are only passive recipients of the idea of purism. Most Koreans sympathize with the idea of language purism, and it is easy to find people bemoaning the spread of English in Korean society. There are several non-academic, non-governmental organizations which focus on the protection and purification of Korean, such as Hangeul Munhwa Yeondae (Hangeul Culture League) and Gukeo Munhwa Undong Bonbu (Headquarters of the Korean Language Culture Movement), which often work as lobby groups critical of government language policy. On college campuses, student activist organizations devoted to Korean language purism can often be found. Thus, linguistic purism is not just an idea imposed from above or an obsessions of a few fanatics, but a quite widespread and popular idea. And the notion of linguistic purism does provide a major source of criticism towards the hegemony of English in Korean society. It is also important to recognize that language purism does not only work in a negative way by resisting foreign influences. In some contexts, Korean is perceived not only as a symbol of Korean identity, but also as a sign of progressiveness and creativity. For example, native Korean terms such as dongali, which replaces the English loanwords geulup ‘group’ or seokeul ‘circle’, and dwipuli, which replaces aepeuteo ‘after’(an informal get-together which follows

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a formal meeting) are terms that became popular on college campuses but are now widely used in other domains of society as well. These are not necessarily tied to the idea of Koreanness, but to an openness that is associated with the vitality of college culture. Also, since it is sometimes believed that native Korean words are less productive morphologically and thus more difficult to create than English ones, a pure Korean neologism may be perceived as more creative and fresh than a loanword. However, it is also true that stronger versions of linguistic purism, such as those which aim to replace all lexical items from a non-Korean source with pure Korean words, are often met with criticism. For example, in his overview of language purism in Korea, Park Nahm-Sheik, a professor of English language at Seoul National University, criticizes language purists as “too simplistic” and “too unrealistic”, arguing that they attack “perfectly natural” words in current use in favor of “overly contrived pure Korean words” (1989: 137). Of course, critics such as Park miss the point that what is “natural” in language use is in fact a political issue, as the notion of “naturalness” is socially constructed in the first place. What such criticism shows, though, is that language purism remains an area of contestation in Korean society. At the same time, nationalistic language attitudes and the heavy pursuit of English clearly coexist in Korea, with little indication that they may potentially be contradictory.

4. Conclusion In short, the question of the status of English in Korea is a very complex issue which cannot simply be answered by surveying some social variable of English, such as the presence of Korean-English bilingualism or the status of English within the educational system. Korea is highly monolingual, yet in serious pursuit of English, and is strongly resistant to English, while actively seeking it; such a conflicting pattern cannot be accounted for by a simple correlational analysis. Of course, this complexity is a result of the interweaving of cultural, political, economical, historical, and educational issues; but I also suggest that this is not merely an outcome of intersecting social forces outside the domain of language. The overview of the Korean linguistic situation underlines the importance of language ideology. The way Koreans view their country as a monolingual nation, the way they consider English a crucial resource for their nation’s and their own survival, and the way they see English as a language in counter-distinction to their national language, Korean, are all closely connected to the large-scale social phenomena that surround English. Our analysis of the question of English in Korea should focus on the fact that these ideologies reflect interested

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positions embedded in various social forces, and that those same ideologies also allow such forces to be connected and associated with the language of English in the first place. The question is, then, how are these ideologies reproduced and articulated through the discursive practices of Koreans? Without a clear understanding of how these ideologies of English are produced and circulated, we cannot fully understand the complex and contradictory ambivalence that characterizes the status of English in Korean society. It is the basic assumption of this book that Koreans themselves, through the discourse practices in which they engage throughout their everyday linguistic lives, play a major role in the production and circulation of these ideologies. Language and social forces have a real connection only through the language user’s socio-cognitive imagination, as language ideologies are fundamentally social interpretations of the meaning of language, rather than abstract social processes devoid of human agency. Through discourse about English, speakers engage in language ideological work that embrace and negotiate the multiple significances of the language, thereby participating in the reproduction of an ideological complex that represents the ambiguities about English that are manifest in various domains of Korean society we observed in this chapter. It follows from this that our study of English in Korea must start from sites where ideologies of English can be observed in their ordinary environment: metalinguistic discourse in natural contexts of language use. In the next chapter, we begin our analysis of such sites.

Chapter 3 Debating English: Language ideologies in the Official English debate 1. Language ideological debates in the age of globalization Some people called it the day Korea lost its economic sovereignty. Others called it another gukchiil ‘Day of National Shame,’ likening it to the day the 45-year long Japanese colonial rule over Korea began in 1919. On December 3, 1997, the Korean government, as well as the candidates for the upcoming presidential election just two weeks down the road, signed an agreement promising to follow through the conditions for economic reform put forth by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in return for receiving a $56 billion bailout package to deal with the financial crisis that was sweeping the country. The Korean government’s effort to make a transition from a government-led development state into a market-driven economy had not been going smoothly. The financial market had grown unstable through unsound managerial practices of large business conglomerates (known as jaebeol groups) and deregulation, and the government’s enthusiastic pursuit of globalization since the mid 1990s had left this market with no protection from the rapid pullout of speculative foreign funds that feared recession. When currency crises broke out in Thailand, Indonesia, and other countries in the region earlier that year, the impact quickly spread to Korea, and the Korean won was steeply devalued, more than doubling the foreign debt of the country. As a condition for the loan to help Korea out of the crisis, IMF ordered more openness towards the global market, on the premise that it would stabilize the Korean financial market through competition – even though such new conditions of the global economy were one of the factors that led to the crisis in the first place.2 Thus the IMF sidae ‘age of the IMF’ began. While Korea was able to bring its economy back on track and return all the loans by 2001, during the years of the financial crisis the Korean people had to experience the harsh reality of globalization. Massive restructuring of Korean businesses due to bursting bubbles led to layoffs everywhere, recording the highest unemployment rate in the nation’s history – hence the reinterpretation of the acronym IMF as “I am fired” – and those lucky enough to keep their jobs were faced with mandatory unpaid leave of absence or cuts in salary. It was a period through which Koreans came to realize that they were already embroiled deeply in the global economy, ready or not.As Koreans struggled to make their way through this difficult period,

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globalization came to have a concrete, material meaning in their minds – as a glorious but vicious arena in which one has to compete endlessly to survive. And it is within this context that the “Official English debate,” a language policy debate which focused on the question of whether English should be established as an “official language” of Korea so that the country can be a more competitive player in the global economy, took place. I begin my discussion of ideologies of English in Korea with the Official English debate because of several reasons. First, the debate was located precisely at the intersection of English and globalization, discussing the very connection between the spread of English and local identity in the globalizing world, in the context of an economic crisis that was still fresh in the minds of Koreans. English as an international language has not only been a matter of scholarly discussion, but also one of public interest as well. In many national contexts, the emergence of English as a globally important language often leads to anxiety over successfully securing the language as a resource for economic development. For this reason, many societies have engaged in debates about the (perceived) low national levels of English skills, sometimes leading to nation-wide campaigns or education reform for boosting their citizens’ competence in English (e.g., as in Singapore: Rubdy 2001; Kramer-Dahl 2003). At the same time, the seemingly unstoppable spread of English may stir fear within societies which view their language as a critical symbol for their culture and identity. Thus discussions about English’s encroachment upon multiple domains of social life often include resistant discourse against the continued expansion of the language (e.g., as in Europe: Philipson 2003). In some countries where English traditionally has played the role of a foreign language, the tension between these opposing anxieties often surface in debates about whether English should be made an official language of the country, as was the case in Japan (Funabashi 2000; Matsuura et al. 2004) and Taiwan (Wang 2002), as well as in Korea. The contexts in which debates over officializing English took place were all similar. There was increasing national-level emphasis on globalization, with English being seen as a critical resource which would allow the country to maintain and further develop the economic advantage it had worked so hard to achieve, while the citizens’ general monolingualism in local languages (in the case of Korea and Japan) were perceived to be working against a successful adoption of English. In addition, local languages were still considered to be an important symbol of national identity. In the Korean Official English debate, these contexts were particularly relevant to the financial crisis, since, on the one hand, the crisis underlined the importance of securing the global symbolic resource of English, and on the other hand, it also made people recognize the importance of their national identity, for the intervention of IMF also made clear to them

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that their sense of national pride and self-determination could easily be compromised under the strong forces of globalization. The Official English debate occurred against this backdrop, and quickly became a site where people’s anxiety regarding English and the global economy was expressed and articulated. Therefore, carefully following the debate provides us with an opportunity to examine how the social and material experiences of people connect with the way people conceptualize the relationship between English, globalization, and cultural identity in local context. Second, the Official English debate is a useful place to start our discussion because it serves as a good vantage point where we can observe in detail the discursive and social processes through which such local conceptualizations of the global takes place. It is well recognized that language ideological debates are useful objects of inquiry, as numerous recent studies demonstrate (see the papers in Blommaert 1999a, as well as Donahue 2002; Kramer-Dahl 2003; Stroud 2004; Hogan-Brun 2005, among others). They are attractive to the researcher not only because they contain explicit instantiations of language ideologies but also because they show us how those ideologies intersect with the interests and positions of powerful social actors involved in the debate, and how the debate as a discursive process serves as a site for the reproduction of those interests. This nature of language ideological debates has led researchers to identify them as a site of “struggle for authoritative entextualization” (Blommaert 1999b: 9; see also Silverstein and Urban 1996). This point is particularly relevant for the case of Korea, as it draws our attention to the fact that when global discourses of English are localized, such localization does not occur within a social vacuum, but within highly specific configurations of power. As global English takes on local meaning through discourse, such processes are shaped by multiple actors, including powerful institutions and individuals, and the way they interact with each other. In Korean context, those actors include major corporations (jaebeols) and the conservative press, who are not only powerful actors but also have a large stake in a neoliberal model of economic globalization. An important question here, then, is: how were images of global English filtered through the lens of the interests and social positions of such powerful actors to produce local ideologies of English? Studying the Korean Official English debate allows us to investigate at least one aspect of this question. I will argue below that, in the Korean Official English debate, the conservative press, whose interests were closely connected to those of major corporations, played a significant role in initiating and intensifying the debate. Because the conservative press had significant control over how the debate was to be framed metalinguistically – for instance, it framed the discourse event as a “debate” (nonjaeng), that is, an adversarial collision between two

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politically opposing parties, despite the fact that the ideological positions of the participants were much more multiple and ambivalent – it was also able to give rise to a particular manifestation of the ideological complex of English. One major effect of this was naturalization of the ideology of self-deprecation, which made it an uncontestable ideology that worked to support the hegemony of English in Korean society. Analyzing the Official English debate, then, allows us to investigate the connections between local and global discourses of English, while also paying attention to the network of local social relations that constrain such linkages. The goal of this chapter, then, is to study the Korean Official English debate with a critical stance, investigating the specific discursive mechanisms through which certain interests and positions are rendered dominant. Taking a critical stance here does not mean I am interested in proving whether the arguments that were articulated throughout the debate are “right” or “wrong.” Though I will outline in detail those arguments in order to contextualize the debate, it is not my goal to investigate the validity of those claims (though I do criticize some of those claims occasionally) or to dismiss the ideologies that underlie the arguments as false beliefs. Rather, I take those arguments (their content as well as the specific ways in which they are articulated) to be context-specific instantiations of language ideologies that contribute to the hegemonic status of English in Korea. It is my purpose to uncover how this particular discursive site serves as a locus for ideology reproduction by studying it as an instance of metalinguistic discourse that is situated within a specific social context. The data for the analysis presented in this chapter are texts produced in various print media during the height of the Official English debate. They consist of newspaper and magazine articles as well as monographs written by elite writers and journalists that appeared during the initial three phases of the debate (1998–2001; see Yoo (2005) and the discussion in section 2.2 below for the phases of the debate). While the idea of making English an official language was also debated through other media, including Internet discussion boards, television and radio broadcasts, as well as through casual conversation between individuals, I chose to focus on the print media because this was where the debate was first initiated and made prominent. By focusing on the print media, I am not discounting the importance of other actors or modalities through which the debate took place, but instead choosing to draw our attention to the process of how the interests of powerful institutional actors – the conservative press and elite authors who were the primary contributors to the debate in the print media – come to shape the discourses of English as an official language. I also focus on texts produced during the early stages of the debate because this was the period of most heightened and intense discussion which also received heaviest

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coverage in the media, thus presumably being the part of the debate that was most influential in shaping ideologies of English. Our discussion below will begin with a detailed survey of the origins, unfolding, and political implications of the debate, which will serve as an important backdrop for the analysis of this chapter. It will then move on to consider how the three ideologies of English that make up the ideological complex of English could be identified through the texts of the debate. Finally, it will explore the metapragmatic constraints and political framing of the debate as mediated by the conservative press to uncover how dynamics of metalinguistic discourse enabled the debate to serve as a site for local reproduction of the global hegemony of English.

2. The Official English debate In this section, I provide an overview of the Korean Official English debate: the arguments that initiated the debate, how the debate unfolded, the political implications of the debate, its participants, and its social impact. We must begin by outlining the idea which first gave rise to the debate: the proposal of making English an official language of Korea. 2.1. Bok Geoil and English as an official language In the summer of 1998, a book titled Gukjeeo Sidaeui Minjokeo ‘National Language in the Age of International Language’ (Bok 1998a) was published. The author, Bok Geoil was a novelist who was also well known as a neoliberal social critic. Since the early 1990s, he had been actively advocating the merits of the market-based economy through his attacks on aspects of Korean society which he believed to be deterrents to the capitalist market, as seen through his books such as Hyeonsilgwa Jihyang (‘Reality and Ideal’, 1990) and Jindangwa Cheobang (‘Diagnosis and Prescription’, 1994). Bok presents himself as a jayujuuija ‘libertarian’, arguing strongly in favor of eliminating government regulations on the economy, supporting free trade and privatization, and protecting individual property rights. This is connected to his conservative and anti-socialist political position, as he sees labor movements, protection of working-class interests, and socialist economic policies as working against the free system of capitalism. His position can also be characterized as a highly pragmatic one, which insists that political ideologies and historical traditions should not stand in the way of pursuing “rational choices” based on market principles. Because

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of his stance, Bok had engaged in debates with progressive social critics, as in the debate he had in 1990 with the left-wing political economist Jung Un-Yeong on the validity of Bok’s jayujuui ‘libertarianism’, though these debates were not widely publicized outside of academic circles. In contrast, his 1998 collection of short essays, Gukjeeo Sidaeui Minjokeo, ignited a debate that was widely discussed not only among intellectuals but also in the popular media. This was not only because the proposal of this book touched upon the issue of English, which was already a topic of much interest, but also because it was particularly controversial and provocative: it argued that Korea should abandon the Korean language and make the transition to English, the international language. Because Bok’s book served as a starting point for the Official English debate, we must first go over the claims that Bok make in his book. Bok’s 1998 book was a continuation of his advocacy of neoliberalism. While the title of the book makes reference to language, the text is primarily a criticism of what he identifies as minjokjuui ‘nationalism’. Bok’s claim here is that Korea’s nationalism has become a reckless political dogma that is extremely emotional and close-minded, intolerant of any form of opposition and susceptible to totalitarian ideas in the name of national interest. He sees this form of nationalism as particularly harmful and self-destructive in the context of globalization; it blocks Koreans from making rational choices that would allow them to secure their economic and political interest and to maintain open and cooperative relationships with powerful nations. Some examples that Bok provides of “irrational choices” motivated by nationalism include market protectionism and Korea’s conflict with Japan over the sovereignty of Dokdo island. It is in an application of this idea to the domain of intercultural transference of knowledge that Bok introduces his idea of making English an official language, for which his book came to be most well known, and which started the debate that is the subject of this chapter. Bok’s point of departure is that English has now become an international language. Arguing that the value of a language increases rapidly as more people choose to use it (1998a: 167), Bok claims that the present dominance of English will continue to strengthen, as the language gains more speakers due to its already established usefulness. He presents as evidence the large number of European students who learn English as a second language, and the observation that a large percentage of information on the Internet, particularly in the area of science, is published in English (pp. 171–172). Bok then goes on to argue that, given this situation, having a mother tongue other than English becomes a liability. Since English has become the “global standard” for communication (p. 189), information becomes very difficult and costly to acquire, unless one can access it directly through English. Bok argues, for example, that countries where English is used widely can directly access

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world news through CNN in real time, while Koreans can access only a condensed version at a later time because of their lack of English (p. 190). Bok suggests that this also makes creative work very difficult. Being on the periphery of the “global empire,” Koreans need to constantly refer to the “center” in order to evaluate their work. This endless referral prohibits accumulation of knowledge, and reinforces the dependence of the periphery on the center (pp. 56–57). Bok thus sees Korea’s lack of English as an impediment to acquisition of new knowledge and information, and suggests that eradication of such barriers is a critical task for Korea’s survival in the global world. For this reason, Bok believes there is no reason to insist on using one’s mother tongue. In his view, English will soon be the language of almost all nations, and a majority of languages will become “museum languages,” shunned by ordinary speakers and studied and maintained only by language specialists (p. 173). Since this will happen soon anyway, he reasons, why not start making the switch from Korean to English now? Bok’s argument culminates in a “thought experiment” he suggests to the skeptics among his readers. This experiment consists of asking the question: If your newborn child had the opportunity to choose either English or Korean, which language would you recommend? He suggests that insisting on the use of Korean robs the next generation of the opportunity to freely interact with the world and to enjoy its cultural products and up-to-date information (pp. 192–193). In other words, Koreans’attachment to the Korean language is simply another “irrational choice”. He also counters the concern that Korean culture and tradition would disappear if Korean were no longer used by arguing that using English would in fact facilitate the survival of Korean culture. Koreans’ ability to express their tradition in English would make it accessible to the global community, and allow its values and strengths to be truly appreciated. This would help Korea make a real contribution to humankind, which Bok believes it is currently failing to do (pp. 193–194). Thus, he claims that abandoning Korean in favor of English is what Koreans must eventually do. However, Bok sees two obstacles to changing Korea’s language into English. First, because of Korea’s strong monolingualism in Korean, there are few opportunities for Koreans to acquire English efficiently. He notes that, even though Koreans invest a great deal of time and money in this process, there are simply not many who can use English freely. Citing the critical period hypothesis, he argues that this is no surprise; one cannot learn to use a language fluently if it is learned after a certain age. Second, the strong nationalistic language attitudes of Koreans, another manifestation of minjokjuui according to Bok, render heretical the idea of abandoning the cherished mother tongue. He (rightly) anticipates that there will be resistance and criticism towards his proposal, because of the

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importance of the Korean language to nationalism in Korea, and also because all Koreans have already developed a strong emotional attachment to the Korean language. Bok’s solution to these two problems is to establish English as an official language of Korea. For Bok, making English an official language is only a temporary step until Korea replaces the Korean language with English; “it would be desirable to have a period in which Korean and English can co-exist alongside each other. For this purpose, it would be practical to establish English as an official language.” (p. 180) He believes that, once English is made an official language and then used in everyday life (alongside Korean), it would be easier for Koreans to acquire English due to greater exposure. This acquisition of English, in turn, will gradually reduce the resentment and resistance towards English, opening Koreans’ minds to the idea of becoming monolingual English speakers. In other words, making English an official language is an instrumental and initial step in completely changing the condition of language acquisition and use in Korea. Bok hopes that this would lead Koreans to see the value of having an international language as one’s own language, and to eventually make the choice of abandoning Korean entirely and adopt English as the only language of Korea. It is easy to find problems with the arguments that Bok makes here. Bok plainly acknowledges the status of English as a global language as a fact, implying that the spread of English is ideologically neutral. He simply attributes the global spread of English to the usefulness of the language which derives from its large number of speakers; this is not only problematic in that it is an insufficient account of the spread (note the similarity of Bok’s explanation to de Swann’s (2001) model discussed in chapter 1), but also in that this is a clear example of what Pennycook (2000, 2001) calls “laissez-faire liberalism,” which, despite its claimed neutrality, is highly political because of its concealment of the political forces that surround the hegemony of English. Bok’s strong neoliberal view of economics easily extends to his understanding of language, as he takes a highly instrumental position which treats language simply as a conduit for information; he quickly brushes off the social and cultural functions of language as “irrational” (even though in reality such functions cannot be separated from language’s referential function) and views language as valuable only to the extent that it can bring economic gain. The political nature of Bok’s claims can also be seen from the way he greatly oversimplifies minjokjuui into a monolithic concept, which in fact may be associated with a wide range of political and ideological positions in Korean society (see next section for details). In addition, his claims are clearly not informed by the insights from the fields of language planning and second language acquisition. Bok does not recognize

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the possibility of (stable) bilingualism, assuming that if a nation is to adopt one language, it must abandon the other. Given that multilingualism is a fact of life for a large part of the world’s population, the insistence that Koreans must eventually replace their language with English is clearly misinformed. Also, his concept of establishing a language as an official language apparently means “to put the language into everyday use,” which is quite different from the way the term is used in other national contexts, where an official language is not necessarily used by the majority of population in everyday life. Bok’s arguments also pose practical problems for implementation. Bok does not explain how English can be put into everyday use in the first place, if, as he argues, Koreans’ lack of English skills is such a serious problem so as to demand the drastic measure of adopting English as an official language. Instead, he plainly states without elaboration that “if English becomes an official language, the scattered efforts of indiviauals could be made more effective” (p. 190). Perhaps more importantly, whether making English an official language would be practical and feasible from a language policy perspective, is not discussed in Bok’s book. Given that Korea is primarily monolingual in Korean, and that English has had no established status or everyday use in the country, there are many more questions to be asked regarding Bok’s proposal, but his arguments drastically simplify the issue to an inevitable consequence of the new global world order. Despite these inherent problems, however, Bok’s proposal became a topic of hot debate that was widely publicized. How did this happen? Looking into the unfolding and political implications of the debate can help us understand this question.

2.2. The debate: development and political context Yoo (2005) suggests that the Official English debate proceeded along four phases, an idea which he adopts from Han (2000). The first phase started when Chosun Ilbo, a major conservative newspaper with the largest circulation in Korea, published a short review of Gukjeeo Sidaeui Minjokeo on July 2, 1998. Throughout that month, the newspaper also ran a series of nine short essays written by people who criticized or supported the proposal for official English, including one from Bok himself. Though Chosun Ilbo initially framed this exchange as the ‘nationalism debate’ (minjokjuui nonjaeng), it came to be known more widely as the Official English debate (yeongeo gongyonghwa nonjaeng). This debate received much attention and was reported in other news media as well.

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The second phase began in November 1999, when a public debate on making English an official language of Korea was jointly organized by the jayugieop senteo (Center for Free Enterprise), an economic think tank affiliated with the jaebeol lobbyist group jeonguk gyeongjein yeonhaphoe (Federation of Korean Industries), and hanguk soseolga hyeophoe (Korea WritersAssociation), a group of Korean novelists. As a research group that advocated free market principles and the interests of large businesses, the Center for Free Enterprise used this event to argue that making English an official language of Korea is a necessary step for boosting Korea’s competence in the global market. This debate again received a great deal of attention in the print media, and television broadcasting companies also aired programs debating the issue. The third phase consisted of the debate that occurred in January 2000, which occurred after the news reached Korea that an advisory committee to the Japanese Prime Minister’s office had made a recommendation to actively consider establishing English as the second official language of Japan. Much attention was given to this news through the Korean media, many of them presenting it as evidence that making English an official language is an inevitable trend, and once again, there was much discussion regarding what Korea should do. This coincided with a campaign titled yeongeoga gyeongjaenglyeokida ‘English is competitiveness,’ which Chosun Ilbo ran through its pages from January to September of the same year, emphasizing the importance of English in boosting Korea’s competitiveness in the global economy. During this phase, several monographs on English as an official language, such as Kim Yeongmyeong (2000) and Han Hakseong (2000), were published as well. The combination of these events led to another heated round of debate. The fourth phase that Yoo identifies spans from 2001 and onward, during which intermittent debates were sparked by various proposals produced by the Korean government to give special status to English in designated regions. In 2001 and 2002, when the government proposals to develop special economic zones on Jeju Island and in Incheon, Busan, and Gwangyang, respectively (see chapter 2, section 2.1), one aspect that was highlighted in the media was that English will be given official status so that foreign investors could use English in conducting business with government offices in the region. This created an interdiscursive chain with the earlier debates, firing up more controversy – even though the proposals themselves were substantially different from Bok’s proposal in that the notion of official language used in the government proposals was much closer to a classical definition of an official language (i.e. providing institutional recognition and support in predefined domains). Similarly, in April 2004, there was much controversy when Seoul’s mayor Lee Myung-bak (an aggressive and successful manager who used to work as chief executive for several

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companies owned by Hyundai, one of the largest jaebeol groups, and who was later elected as the president of Korea in 2007) announced that the city government will start using English in official documents and high-level internal meetings as part of an effort to make the city more English-friendly. It is worth noting that, even though the Korean government had made similar proposals before (the idea of a free trade zone in which English would become an official language had been proposed in February 1998 as well) the newer proposals were subject to greater attention from the media and the general public because they occurred after the frenzied debates that had begun in the summer of 1998. The fourth phase thus differed from earlier ones in that the debates here were initiated in reaction to actual policy proposals made by central or regional governments. This means that through this phase, the debate started to move in the direction of discussing actual language policies and their implementation. This also means that the continuing debates started to drift away from the issue of making English an official language, for the government’s plans that triggered those debates were not always about officialization of English. Educational policy issues, such as reduction of the starting age for mandatory English language learning or introduction of English-immersion classes, for instance, also triggered heated rounds of debate following their public announcements (see the discussion in chapter 2, section 2.1 above). The trajectory of the debate points out how the debate was closely tied to the interests of the conservative press and major Korean business conglomerates, particularly during its initial phases, as the ultra-conservative Chosun Ilbo and the jaebeol-supported Center for Free Enterprise played a central role in initiating and developing the debate. The conservative press and major conglomerates were not strange bedfellows at all, as most conservative newspaper companies in Korea are owned either by powerful families or conglomerates, and those papers frequently advocate the interests of conglomerates through their reports. The proposal for English as an official language connected with the interests of these powerful actors on several levels. First, since the argument for officialization of English highlights the need for competitiveness in the global market, it was congruent with the desires of the Korean business conglomerates, who wanted a more neoliberal market-based economic system to be established. Invoking the emergence of English as a global language and connecting it to the changing conditions of the global economy was one way of arguing for the urgency of neoliberal reforms. On a more practical level, a workforce with a better English competence as promised by Bok’s proposal would be something that Korean corporations, which desired to expand more forcefully into the global marketplace, could benefit from. In addition, people such as Han (2000) also suggest that Chosun Ilbo had an even more direct economic motivation

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in initiating the debate. He points out that it is probably not a coincidence that Chosun Ilbo also invested heavily in Seoul National University’s new English testing program called TEPS (T est of English Proficiency developed by Seoul National University), which was introduced in 1998, several months after the debate first began. TEPS was developed as an alternative to foreign tests such as TOEIC, marketed as a more appropriate test for English skills in Korean context, and it was soon adopted by various corporations and government organizations. While Seoul National University administered the test, Chosun Ilbo obtained the right to publish and market study materials and instructional programs for the test. As a result, Chosun Ilbo now participates in the lucrative business of English language teaching through its subsidiary, EduChosun. But perhaps, the ideological implication of the debate was just as important to the conservatives. As mentioned above, Bok’s arguments were closely tied to his criticism of minjokjuui ‘nationalism’. However, his use of the term can be misleading, because nationalism in Korea is not a monolithic idea and may include a whole range of different social positions (Shin Gi-Wook 2006; also see Eriksen 1993). While some may use the term to refer to highly ethnocentric and exclusivist conceptualizations of Korean identity (which might be more appropriately called guksujuui ‘jingoism, chauvinism’), it may also refer to more critical, left-wing political ideas which focus on how global level dependencies result in inequalities within Korean society. In fact, the political left in Korea has historically been supportive of and associated with this sense of nationalism. Since conservative forces throughout modern Korean history often relied on foreign powers to maintain the status quo while sacrificing the interests of dominated social groups, arguing against those foreign powers was seen as a way of resisting the dominant social system and advocating the socially oppressed within Korean society. Bok’s oversimplification of the notion of minjokjuui, then, had the effect of discrediting the positions of progressive groups in Korean politics, as they came to be grouped together with more belligerent and ethnocentric versions of nationalism. This political implication and Bok’s staunch neoliberalist stance were highly valuable assets for the powerful conservatives in Korea, particularly in the context of 1998. It is perhaps relevant here that 1998 was the year immediately after the election of Kim Dae Jung as the president of South Korea, the first time a progressive opposition leader rose to power in the modern history of the nation. To the conservative camp, this change indicated uncertainty about their future relationship with the government. Under the older developmental state model that characterized Korea’s economic ascent, jaebeol groups were seen as important players that moved forward the export-driven economy, and therefore enjoyed long-standing protection and support from the government, a

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favor which the conglomerates repaid by making large political contributions. Anxiety over losing economical and political privileges under the new administration, which the conservatives viewed as leftist, led them to seek new ways of defending their interests. Within this context, Bok emerged as one of the most popular and important neoliberal polemicists who could defend their position, and the publication of Bok’s 1998 book was a good opportunity to put him into use. (Recall that Chosun Ilbo initially framed the debate as a debate between jayujuui ‘libertarianism’ and minjokjuui ‘nationalism’.) We may argue, then, that part of the reason why Bok’s claims could attract so much attention and be a matter of continued debate despite their lack of firm sociolinguistic and logical basis lies in the strategic support of the conservative institutions such as Chosun Ilbo or the Center for Free Enterprise. This shows that the Official English debate had much political significance, not only in the claims that were made in the initial proposal by Bok, but also in the way it was staged, framed, and promoted in Korean society. Through this politicization, the topic of Official English was given a prominent position in the media, leading to the heated debate that would continue over the next few years. In order to understand what specific arguments were made throughout the debate, we must now turn to an outline of who the actual participants in the debate were, and what claims and criticisms they produced through the course of the debate.

2.3. The debate: participants and arguments While Chosun Ilbo framed the initial round of the Official English debate as a clash between “libertarians” and “nationalists”, this characterization was clearly a massive oversimplification of the wide range of social positions represented by the people who took part in the debate. These participants were all elite intellectuals, most of whom were academics, scholars, or prominent writers (and virtually all male), but their personal and political backgrounds as well as their arguments were much more diverse. Moreover, labeling all of Bok’s critics simply as “nationalists” was highly problematic. Those who opposed the idea of Official English came from various positions, focusing on different aspects of Bok’s arguments, particularly during the later phases of the debate. For example, there were scholars devoted to the cause of linguistic purism and promotion of the Korean language, such as writer Nam Yeongsin and political scientist Kim Yeongmyeong, both of whom were leaders of non-governmental lobby groups in support of the Korean language, Gukeo Munhwa Undong Bonbu (Headquarters of the Korean Language Culture Movement) and Hangeul Munhwa Yeondae (Hangeul Culture League), respectively. There were also left-wing critics such

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as Choe Wonsik, the editor of the famous progressive literary magazine Changjakgwa Bipyeong (‘Creation and Critism’) and there were practitioners in the field of English language teaching such as Han Hakseong, a professor of English language teaching trained in formal linguistics. The specific arguments that were waged against the idea of English as an official language were also diverse. Throughout the debate, those who attacked the idea of making English an official language often questioned the underlying ideological basis of their opponents’ claims. In general, the most prominent criticism against Bok’s proposal was that which focused on the issue of Korea’s national identity. Some critics strongly expressed their belief in the Korean language as an important part of their national pride and identity, and thus Bok’s exhortation to abandon Korean was treated as sacrilegious and was identified as an extreme case of sadaejuui ‘toadyism’ (Yi 2002). This type of criticism was particularly salient in the initial exchange in Chosun Ilbo; for example, Han Yeongu (1998), a professor of Korean history at Seoul National University, argued that Koreans should consider whether they want to “live comfortably as a slave, or live freely as one’s own master though in economic difficulty,” likening Bok’s choice to a life of servitude. But even after the exchange in Chosun Ilbo the theme of sadaejuui still remained salient. Kim Yeongmyeong, in his 2000 book, for example, criticizes in a strong, sarcastic language the supporters of Official English as being mindless buffoons suffering from toadyism. Other ideological aspects of Bok’s claims were also criticized throughout the debate. Many critics pointed out the danger in Bok’s strong trust in the free market. Literary critic Choe Weonsik (1998) argued that Bok’s view amounts to a “transplantation of American market ideology into Korea.” Jin Junggweon (1999), a progressive social critic well known for his acerbic attacks on conservatives, defined Bok’s beliefs as “a blind, fanatical belief in the market” and criticized the poverty of Bok’s instrumentalist view of language. Others pointed out the social inequalities that Bok’s proposal would lead to. In an article titled ildeung gukmingwa ideung gukmineulo galeul seminga (‘Should we divide ourselves into first-class and second-class citizens?’), Park Kangmoon (2000), a journalist who writes on issues of communication, argues that, contrary to Bok’s claim that making English an official language will bring easy access to English for all Koreans, officialization of English will only make the powerful class to invest even more in their children’s acquisition of English, exacerbating the class-based inequalities of Korean society. The opponents of English as an official language also pointed out the practical problems inherent in Bok’s proposal. For example, Bok’s confusion about the notion of official language was repeatedly pointed out by people such as Kim Sejung (2001) of the National Academy of the Korean Language, a gov-

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ernment research center for Korea’s language policy, and Cho Dong-il (2001), a professor of comparative literature at Seoul National University. Still others carefully outlined the logical problems of Bok’s proposal. Han Hakseong (2000), professor of English language teaching at Kyung Hee University, pointed out that even if making English an official language was necessary, this could not be implemented unless Koreans learn to use the language fluently first, and for this reason, the problems that Bok discusses are not really problems that can be solved by giving English official status; instead, what Korea needs is a reform of its system of English language teaching. However, Han does agree that putting English into everyday use in limited contexts – such as within English departments of universities or within diplomatic branches of government – would be a viable strategy for improving Koreans’ competence in English. Support for Bok’s proposal also came from various fronts. Literary critic Jung Gwari and conservative political scientist Hahm Jae-Bong both defended Bok from the attacks on his ideological position. Jung (1998) argued that Bok’s proposal for official English should be understood as an outcome of serious deliberation regarding what can be done to allow Korean culture and society to survive in this new environment. Hahm (1998) went further, saying that Bok’s proposal allows Koreans to “do nationalism better”; accepting English as Korea’s own would not only be a way of ensuring the flow of new ideas into Korean society, but also a way of globalizing Korea’s own culture and thoughts. Thus, both authors argued that Korea cannot afford to refuse values and systems that are now globally accepted, and framed Bok’s arguments as a rational choice which will eventually serve the interests of Koreans and ensure Korea’s survival in the age of globalization. On the other hand, Go Jongseok (1999), a journalist with a training in linguistics who wrote widely on issues of language, and Kim Kyung Il (2001), professor of Chinese literature who was well-known for his earlier book criticizing Korea’s Confucian culture, both supported Bok by arguing that Koreans should be more open to adopting English. They pointed out that no language is “pure” in the sense of being free from influence and interference from other languages, and for this reason, Koreans should not fear the increasing influence of English, as Korean culture and language can only benefit from openness towards other languages. However, they did not agree with Bok’s plan for completely replacing the Korean language with English; instead, both envisioned stable Korean-English bilingualism (or multilingualism with the addition of other languages) as the ideal situation for Korea’s linguistic future. Also, throughout the phases of the debate, the conservative press continuously ran report articles that underlined the importance of English in global context, providing indirect support for the idea of English as an official language.

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A good example of this was Chosun Ilbo’s 2000 campaign yeongeoga gyeongjaenglyeokida ‘English is competitiveness’ (see section 2.2 above). Through this campaign, the newspaper emphasized how Korea’s lack of English was causing the nation to fall behind in global competition. In doing so, it reported on numerous areas in which Korea’s English purportedly needed improvement (such as the weak English of diplomats and businesspeople, the broken English of printed materials introducing Korea, and lack of television broadcasts in English), and contrasted them with efforts of other countries which were actively adopting English. While such articles did not directly debate the issue of officializing English, given the major role of the conservative press in the debate, we could argue that this highlighting of the importance of English also contributed to the debate significantly by justifying the need to give the language a more prominent status in Korean society.

2.4. The impact of the debate The description of the course of the debate presented above shows that the debate was largely controlled by powerful actors and institutions of Korean society. How well, then, did this debate reach the general public? Was the debate simply a show put on by the elites and the media that had little relevance to the lives of ordinary people? Were the citizens concerned at all about the unfolding of the debate and the arguments presented in the debate?Yoo (2005) says that, given the large circulation of Chosun Ilbo, “it is very likely that [the newspaper] exercised a potentially huge influence on the formation of public opinion” (p. 16). The Official English debate was in fact a topic that received much attention among the general population, partly due to the highlighting of the debate in the media, to the extent that virtually all Koreans became familiar with the term gongyongeo ‘official language.’ But gauging the specific effect of the debate on public opinion is a more complex matter. There are some reports that suggest that the idea of making English an official language received at least some popular support. For example, several newspaper reports pointed out that there are just as many people who support making English an official language as there are people who oppose it, and sometimes even more. An article in Chosun Ilbo reports that 45.1% of the 37,000 respondents to their Internet poll supported making English an official language and 54.9% opposed it (Gim 1998b). Similarly, another major conservative newspaper, Donga Ilbo, stated that, in a joint survey they conducted with a public opinion research firm, 63.1% supported officialization of English (Shin 2000) (Also see a summary of various such surveys in Yoo (2005)). But of

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course, these numbers can be problematic, because the reports do not reveal who the respondents are and how their responses were collected, and also because the newspapers which presented these findings were also deeply involved in the debate themselves. Han (2000) interprets the apparently high numbers in support of officialization as a result of the respondents not being fully informed about what making English an official language actually entails; that is, “it is likely the case that most of those who supported officialization of English did so while thinking ‘if it can make all Koreans speak English fluently, then we should make English an official language”’ (p. 49). That the numbers reported in the newspaper articles above exaggerate the support given to officialization of English can be seen from the fact that Internet users, whose reactions supposedly form the basis of these reports, actually seem to be strongly against the idea. For example, the aforementioned article in Chosun Ilbo, which showed that nearly half of the respondents supported making English an official language, also mentioned that approximately 95% of the 1,185 postings on their discussion board were against it (Gim 1998b). Most Internet postings discussing the issue also typically criticized the broad ideological basis of the idea, rather than specific problems of the proposal. For instance, problems such as the confusion over the notion of official English, or the practical problems of implementing Bok’s proposal, which were pointed out in the texts written by elite participants, were rarely mentioned in postings by the general public. This seems to show that the specific details of the arguments in the debate were not successfully conveyed to ordinary citizens, supporting Han’s interpretation. Since Bok’s proposal was presented by the media as a new idea that could resolve the problem of Korea’s English language learning once and for all, people who perceived learning English as a heavy burden naturally would have become interested in it, though the radical nature of the proposal also would have led them to resist it at the same time. It would probably be correct to say that they did not necessarily believe that replacing Korean with English, or even using English in their daily lives alongside Korean, would be possible, but they were so frustrated with having to learn English that they would have welcomed the government taking initiative in addressing the problem and introducing some bold policy change (for a report on similar attitudes in Japanese context, see Matsuura et al. 2004). These observations may appear to suggest that the general public was not seriously concerned with the Official English debate, as it seems to be the case that many people were not fully aware of the specific issues involved. But that a deeper understanding of the implications of making English an official language was not conveyed to the general public was in fact an important aspect of the debate. As I pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, the debate was an

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important part of the ongoing shaping of what it means for Korea to be part of the new global economy. More specifically, the debate, which linked the global economy, Korea, and its citizens through the mediation of English, formulated a particular view on what the status of English should be and what is to be expected from the worker under the new conditions of modernity, a view that reflected an already on-going change in the direction of globalization as pursued by the government and big businesses in control of the labor market. The fact that such (re)valuation of English and (re)imagining of the worker occurred under drastic oversimplification of relevant information points to the ways in which the debate served as a site through which ideologies of English were marshaled to reproduce those particular visions of English and globalization. An important question we can ask at this point is: How did the Official English debate come to have this effect? After all, this was a debate in which many elite participants fiercely criticized the idea of making English an official language. How were the interests of the conservative forces and the problems inherent in the proposal to make English an official language made unnoticeable, when they were constantly being underlined by those who opposed officialization of English? The context of the debate as outlined above suggests some ways in which the political conditions of the debate – such as the conservative media’s discursive intervention – may have contributed to this effect. But in order to fully understand how such political positions come to be intertwined with local constructions of the hegemony of English despite forces that work against them, we need to explore in more detail what discursive mechanisms allowed for such processes to take place. In the remainder of this chapter, I will discuss this question by focusing on the role of broadly circulating ideologies of English and metalinguistic discourse in the Official English debate.

3. Three ideologies of English in the Official English debate In this section, I discuss how the ideological complex of English that was introduced in chapter 1 was manifest in the texts of the Official English debate, by discussing how its three elements – necessitation, externalization, and selfdeprecation – were articulated. 3.1. Necessitation: English as a necessity The ideology of necessitation constructs English as a necessity in Korea. According to this ideology, even though Korea is perceived to be a monolingual

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society, at least some competence in English is also considered to be necessary. For this reason, it is believed that Koreans ought to be able to use English to some extent, even if they may not actually be able to do so. That is, the ideology of necessitation reflects Koreans’ beliefs about the social and linguistic condition in which they are located: Koreans need to know English, and not knowing English has negative consequences. Necessitation may be seen as a particular type of authorization (Bucholtz and Hall 2004), which justifies the authority of English by highlighting its purported pragmatic indispensability. This ideology is frequently invoked in the texts of the Official English debate, as necessity of English is treated as a natural consequence of globalization; in the globally interconnected world, the international language of English becomes the basic mode of communication. This can be illustrated by the following statement from Bok’s book. (1)

tto hananeun yeongeoga siljiljeokeulo gukjeeoga doeeossdaneun sasilida. yeongeoga imi jinin jungyoseonggwa gwonwineun mullon jeomjeom keojil geosida. geulaeseo yeongeoleul baeuneun geoseun daleun oegukeoleul baeuneun geosgwaneun seonggyeoki geunbonjeokeulo daleuda. peulangseueona ilboneona leosiaeoe daehan jisiki eopseodo, ulineun pyeonhage sal su issda, bilok aswiwo hal ttaedo issjiman. geuleona yeongeoe daehan choesohanui jisiki eopsineun nugudo pyeonhage sal su eopsda. . . . apeulo yeongeoleul moleumyeon, manheun gyeongue siljiljeok munmaengi doenda. [Another is the fact that English has practically become an international language. Of course, the importance and authority that English has already achieved will continue to grow. Therefore, learning English is fundamentally different from learning other major foreign languages. Without knowledge of French, Japanese, Russian, we may still live comfortably, even though we may occasionally face inconveniences. However, without a minimal knowledge of English, no one can live comfortably. . . . In the future, those who do not know English will be practically illiterate in many cases.] (Bok 1998a: 137–8)

In the quotation above, in which Bok enumerates the reasons why Koreans want to learn English, he explicitly presents English as a necessity for Koreans – despite the fact that the everyday lives of most Koreans do not require them to use English. The necessity of English is highly naturalized here. Bok accomplishes this first by stating, in a matter-of-fact way, that ‘English has practically become an international language,’ thereby framing lack of English as a fatal problem. Necessity of English is further emphasized by comparison with the occasional but tolerable inconvenience of not knowing other major languages of the world.

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Supporters of officializing English repeatedly underscored that English is necessary for the economic survival of Korea within the context of globalization. In conservative newspapers and magazines, articles emphasizing the importance of English skills in the global economy were easily found. Some representative headlines included Yeongeo neunglyeok gyeokcha jeongbolyeok gyeokchalo ieojyeo “Disparity in English ability leads to disparity in information capabilities” (Maeil Gyeongje 1999) or Jidocheung jjalpeun yeongeo tase gukik keun pihae “Huge damages to national interest due to the limited English of leaders” (Gwon 2000). These articles constantly warned that lack of English skills will cause Korea to fall behind in the highly competitive international market, citing numerous (purported) examples of Korean government officials or businessmen failing to make their voices heard in international meetings because of their limited English, and contrasting them with officials and managers from Hong Kong and Singapore who speak fluent English. In the wake of the financial crisis of 1997, these claims would have struck a particularly strong note with Koreans. However, English is not only constructed as a necessity for those who are directly engaged in international business or diplomacy. For example, the article in Maeil Gyeongje mentioned above claims that “if more Korean businesses are to expand overseas and pioneer markets, everyone from managers to low-level workers must be able to use English fluently,” suggesting that even the English skills of those whose jobs may not involve using English can still have a large impact on Korea’s success in the global stage. In fact, it was quite common to find claims that in global competition the English ability of every citizen matters. For example, The Korea Times, an English-language daily, quotes Lee Myung-bak, then the mayor of Seoul, as saying that Seoul needs to be a city “where at least people can explain simple directions in English when they encounter foreigners on the street,” as this will help Seoul become a regional center of finance in Asia (Na 2003). It is worth noting here that this imagery of chance encounters with a Western, English-speaking foreigner (and the corresponding image of an embarrassed Korean who cannot say a single word in English) is a constant obsession in Korean discourses of English, one of the most repeatedly invoked scenarios across many different sites (including jokes and television shows, as we will discuss in chapters 4 and 5) that is used to emphasize the necessity of English and to illustrate how Koreans are not equipped with this necessary language. In reality, making large investments in learning English to prepare for the occasion in which a foreigner might approach a Korean on the street makes little practical sense, because it is probably not the case that such chance encounters occur frequently; in fact, it is more likely that such encounters are rare. (Personally, as

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a Korean who has lived in Seoul for over twenty years and makes regular trips to the city, I can testify that I never had such an experience.) The fact that such tropes persist despite lack of any practical grounding shows how naturalized the ideology of necessiation is. However, the most important dimension of this naturalization is how the necessity of English is presented as having to do with more than just practical matters. That is, English is a necessity not just because of its immediate need in conducting business transactions internationally or in making a good impression on Westerners, but because the world we live in has become a place where we simply cannot avoid English. This, again, is illustrated in the quotation from Bok in (1) above. By saying that “no one can live comfortably” without knowing English, and that “those who do not know English will be practically illiterate,” Bok likens English to a mode of living, a basic need in daily life. In particular, he naturalizes the place of English in Korean by drawing a parallel between English and literacy; given that literacy, in Western ideology, is conceived as a fundamental element of our modern social life, lack of English skills comes to mean backwardness, evidence of maladaptation to the new norm of globality. The ideology of necessitation, then, connects the English language with Koreans’ understanding of the world order under globalization, making English a much needed language for the world they live in despite their largely monolingual life. By contrast, the second language ideology we will discuss underlines the Otherness of English in Korean society.

3.2. Externalization: English as language of an Other The ideology of externalization presents English as a language of an Other: in the context of the debate, this ideology frequently took the form of highlighting the foreignness of English. Of course, English is obviously a foreign language in Korea, but this ideology further constructs English as symbolically standing against what is uniquely Korean. In other words, according to this ideology, the Korean language is seen as an essential component of a Korean identity, and the identity indexed by English is not merely different, but against that idea of Koreanness. In this sense, externalization is the mirror image of essentialization (Bucholtz and Hall 2004), one necessarily implying the other. Externalization figures prominently in the way supporters of English as an official language were characterized by their opponents. As discussed above, those who support English as an official language were criticized as being guilty of sadaejuui ‘toadyism,’ a term that carries a particularly negative connotation in

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Korean society. Language activist Kim Yeongmyeong, for example, caustically criticizes the fetishism of English among Korean elites and in government policy through his book titled Naneun gobalhanda: gim yeongmyeong gyosuui yeongeo sadaejuui ttwieoneomgi ‘I accuse: Professor Kim on overcoming English toadyism’ (2000), arguing that the proposal to officialize English is nothing more than a blind worship of U.S. culture and power. Also used were terms such as sungmijuui ‘worshipping of the U.S.’, which explicitly treats the valorization of English as self-imposed subordination towards a powerful Other. These examples show that an alignment with English is often treated as treacherous, illustrating how English is considered to be in opposition to the idea of Koreanness. Similar attitudes can also be found from the metaphors that are employed in the texts of the debate. In referring to Korean, opponents of official English make frequent use of metaphors that invoke a communal image of national identity. For example, journalist Park Kangmoon writes, “when a nation or people is in crisis, it is one’s mother tongue that provides comfort like one’s hometown” (Park 2000), and literary translator and novelist Yi Yungi (1998) quotes the well-known words of the poet Gim Soun who said, “even if my mother were a leper, I would not exchange her for Cleopatra.” Gim Soun’s original essay, written in 1951, was a protest against the Japanese characterizations of Korean society and culture as abject and contemptible; through the essay, Gim expresses his love for his country by identifying it with his mother, a metaphor Yi Yungi borrows to talk about the Korean language. The use of metaphors of hometown and mother reflects a belief that one’s language is an integral, inalienable part of one’s identity. This idea is more strongly reflected in the following quotation from Bak Byeongsu, professor of English at Kyung Hee University. (2)

han oegukeoleul inwijeokeulo gukeolo mandeuneun geoseun uliui jeongcheseongeul eokjilo byeongyeonghaneun gesgwa gatda. geuleohgi ttaemune geugeoseun isseul su eopsneun ilida. ulimaleun uli momgwa gatda. momeun taeeonal ttae bumonim(josang)eulobuteo mullyeobateun saengmulhakjeok yusanigo, ulimaleun yeoksawa jeontongeul tonghae uli josangeulobuteo mullyeobateun jeongsinjeok yusanida. uli momgwa uli maleun uli maeumdaelo bakkul su issneun geosi anida. oegukeoneun eodikkajina oegukeoiji ulimali doel suneun eopsda. [To make a foreign language our own language by purposeful intervention is to change our identity by force. For this reason, it is unthinkable. Our language is like our body. Our body is a biological inheritance which we received from our parents (ancestors) when we were born, and our language is an inheritance of the mind we received from our ancestors through history and tradition. We cannot change our body or our lan-

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guage by will. A foreign language will always be a foreign language, and it will never be our own language.] (Bak Byeong-su 2001) Here, the Korean language is seen as an essence that represents a Korean identity, as the author suggests that the language is like one’s body, which is not only inalienable but also something for which one must be grateful (particularly in the Confucian worldview which he evokes through the idea of the body as inheritance); it is a result of a continuous flow of history and tradition, a part of who we are. It is in this sense that English starkly contrasts with Korean. English, as a foreign language, cannot in any sense replace the sense of identity Korean provides. That is, English “will always be a foreign language.” Also replete in the discourse of the opponents of English as an official language are references to what are commonly considered periods in Korean history in which Korea’s national identity was threatened. In particular, authors frequently draw a parallel between the period of Japanese colonization and the present. This shows that the authors see the increasing power of English as akin to a colonialist imposition; that is, English is understood not simply as a foreign language but a threatening language that ultimately stands against the Korean language. We already saw an example of this in Yi Yungi’s quotation of Gim Soun; the colonial context of Gim’s writing interdiscursively casts the spread of English in an imperialist light. In a more explicit case, Korean language scholar and language activist Nam Yeongsin (1998) likens Bok to an intellectual of the Silla dynasty. In the 7th century, Silla united the three kingdoms of the Korean peninsula by forming an alliance with China. According to popular historical interpretation among Koreans, this marked the beginning of Korea’s cultural and political dependence on China, serving as the root of sadaejuui. For this reason, Nam’s charge conjures up strong images of slavish self-betrayal, dramatically underlining the idea that adopting English is to deny who Koreans really are. Similarly, in the following quotation, Park Kangmoon makes an analogy between the current Korean situation and the period of Japanese colonization. (3)

han minjokeul daleun minjokgwa gajang hwaksilhage galeuneungeoseun eoneoida. hangukeoga isseoseo hanguk minjokeun hanguk minjokida. ilaeseo aegukseonyeoleun ulimal uligeuleul jikilyeogo haesseumyeo, chimlyakja ilboneun hangukeoleul eopsaelyeohaessda. maleul jikyeooji anhasseumyeon ulineun jinjak ttan nalaui ilbuga doeeosseul geosimyeo minjokui jeongcheseongeul jikiji mos haesseul geosida. [What most clearly distinguishes one people from another is language. The Korean people are Korean because of the Korean language. This is why our patriotic ancestors tried to defend our language and writing, and

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this is why the Japanese invaders tried to eradicate Korean. If we didn’t maintain our language we would have been a part of another country a long time ago, and wouldn’t have been able to protect our identity as a people.] (Park Kangmoon 2000) By invoking memories of Japanese colonial language policy in which Korean was banned and the Japanese language was imposed upon Koreans, such critics position English as a language that threatens and can potentially destroy Korean identity. To these authors, to lose one’s language is to lose one’s country, and the imposition of English may lead to such dire consequences. The examples above show that the ideology of externalization highlights the Otherness of English; they demonstrate that English is constructed not simply as a foreign language, but as a marked intrusion into Koreanness, an adoption of which amounts to an act of betrayal. 3.3. Self-deprecation: Koreans as bad speakers of English The third ideology of English, self-deprecation, views Koreans as “bad speakers of English,” who, despite strenuous efforts to learn the language, do not possess sufficient competence in English to use it in a meaningful way. Through this ideology, variation in the level of English skills that actually exists among Koreans is erased, and the large amount of language learning that the majority of Koreans undertake is deemed ineffective; instead, Koreans as a whole are viewed as hopelessly incapable of mastering English. This ideology is not just a belief about Koreans’ competence per se, but is an illegitimizing ideology, which limits structural power from an identity (Bucholtz and Hall 2004); it is a shameful admittance that they lack legitimate competence in the language and therefore are subordinate to native speakers who have more power due to their linguistic capital. In this sense, when Koreans say that they don’t speak English well, this is an inherently different claim from their saying that they don’t speak, say, Arabic or French well; the latter is a more neutral claim which merely states that they don’t speak those languages because they are not Arabic or French. The notion that Koreans are incompetent in English forms an important logical basis for the proposal in favor of official English. In the context of the debate, self-deprecation is closely linked with necessitation; that is, claims of Koreans’ incompetence in English are commonly connected with claims that Korea is therefore losing out on important opportunities because of that incompetence. One familiar argument in the debate was that Korea faces many disadvantages in the global stage because of the limited English of Korean businesspeople and diplomats. For example, the article in Maeil Gyeongje mentioned in 3.1 above

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states, “It is a well-known secret that Japan and Korea have a smaller voice in international meetings compared to their economic power. [. . . ] If there is a cocktail party after the meeting, Koreans are most likely to be found stuck in the corner of the room standing together by themselves” (Maeil Gyeongje 1999). In the context of the Korean financial crisis, some instances of these claims were particularly sensationalized. The Chosun Ilbo article that was also referred to above reports an example in which a high-level government official, at a press conference that was held at the dawn of the financial crisis, failed to explain the country’s economic situation to foreign reporters because of his bad English. According to the article, for instance, when asked the question “How do you believe IMF’s intervention would change the status of the Bank of Korea?” the official simply answered, “I have never thought of my power,” apparently misunderstanding the question. The article goes on to suggest that this incident was destructive in the context of the crisis, because, “rather than conveying Korea’s will to overcome the crisis, [it caused Korea to] lose the trust [of the international society]” (Gwon 2000). Of course, virtually all reports like these never demonstrate in what specific way did alleged lack of English skills cause damage to the Korean economy, yet they are commonly invoked to problematize the current state of Koreans’ English skills and to emphasize the need for radical change to fix this situation. This point can be further illustrated through the following quotation where Bok explains why English must be made an official language. (4)

uli sahoeeseodo . . . modu yeongeoleul baeuneunde keun tujaleul hago issda. ajik mogukeodo baeuji moshan aileul yeongeohakwone bonaeneun bumodeullobuteo ieoponeul kkigo yeongeohoehwaleul baeuneun jungnyeondeule ileukikkaji. antakkapgedo, geuleon tujaneun hyoyuli aju najda. geulaeseo naneun ildan yeongeoleul ulimalgwa hamkke gongyongeolo sameul geoseul jeanhan geosida. [In our society, . . . everyone makes big investments in learning English, from parents who send their children to English language school before they have even learned to speak their mother tongue, to middle-aged people who study English conversation with their headphones on. Unfortunately, such investments are very inefficient. This is why I proposed to temporarily establish English as an official language alongside Korean.] (Bok 1998b)

According to Bok, Koreans’ failure to master English is so complete (the significant investment in time and money that Koreans make in order to learn English is “inefficient” and ineffective) that the only possible way for Koreans

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to learn English is to take drastic measures: to establish English as an official language and to use it on a daily basis – that is, to change the entire linguistic environment into an English-speaking one. It is worth noting in this regard that, in the Official English debate, there has been little discussion about what specifically is the problem with English language teaching methods in Korea. In Korean discourses of English in general, it is often assumed that the source of Koreans’ incompetence in English is the long-standing history of grammar-translation methods that have traditionally dominated practices of English language teaching in Korea. But given the fact that most Koreans have been aware of such problems for a long time, and that the government was by the mid 1990s already in the process of introducing communicative language teaching approaches into the national curriculum to address those problems, it is remarkable that contributors to the debate rarely pointed out any specific problems with the national curriculum except to reiterate older complaints about the grammar-translation approach. On the one hand, this might have to do with the fact that the debate was largely disconnected from the profession of English language teaching (specialists in English language teaching rarely contributed to the debate, with the major exception being Han Hakseong of Kyung Hee University). But on the other, this could be seen as a reflection of how incompetence in English is seen as a fundamental trait of Koreans; that is, Koreans’ incompetence is such that nothing short of complete immersion into an English-speaking environment will help them learn the language successfully, and other efforts such as communicative teaching methods or reassessment of goals for English language learning are almost certain to fail given this essential incompetence. This essentialization of incompetence can also be seen from the way Koreans’ lack of English skills is generalized to apply to all Koreans, rather than specific subgroups of Koreans. That is, just as English was constructed as relevant to all Koreans through the ideology of necessitation, self-deprecation represents all Koreans as lacking good competence. Self-deprecation is thus not an othertargeting ideology, which attributes incompetence to some group other than one’s own, but a self-targeting one (hence the name self -deprecation); this is in contrast to other national contexts in which anxiety about “falling standards” in language use are typically targeted at youths, linguistic minority groups or certain dominated classes like the uneducated. In the Korean case, as we have seen above, even those who are expected to have good competence in English (such as the well-educated officials or businesspeople) are constructed as lacking good competence; this underlines how strongly Koreans as a whole are constructed as incompetent and how incompetence in English is presented as a generalized trait of Koreans.

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Of course, it is not the case that every Korean lacks good English skills, and obviously there are Koreans who have managed to learn to speak English fluently. Also, we would naturally expect to see difference in competence between social groups due to unequal opportunities for English language learning as well as individual differences. The discussion in this section should not be seen as implying that Koreans are completely unaware of such differences. Instead, self-deprecation must be seen as an ideological process through which such differences are explained away (Park 2005a), thus becoming subject to erasure (Irvine and Gal 2000). That is, the ideology of self-deprecation makes strong generalizations about Koreans’ incompetence in English, and problematizes this incompetence by highlighting Koreans’ repeated failure to master the language, in spite of contradictory evidence that obviously exists in Korean society.

4. Ideological dynamics in the Official English debate Having identified the three ideologies of English that are articulated in the Official English debate, let us now move on to a discussion of the specific discursive mechanisms that allowed the debate to serve as a locus for reproduction of hegemonic discourses of English and the interests of powerful actors that were tied to such discourses. For this purpose, I will focus on two aspects: the nature of the three ideologies as shared ideologies, and the site-specific metapragmatic constraints and the political framing of the debate. 4.1. The three ideologies as an ideological complex In the previous section, we discussed three ideologies of English that were identifiable from the texts of the Official English debate. However, as noted in chapter 1, these three ideologies should not be thought of as existing independently; instead, I suggested that we see them as elements that make up the holistic conceptualization of English that circulates within Korean society. What this means is that even though Koreans may not consciously or willfully subscribe to all three ideologies in all contexts, they will still need to address these ideologies in some way when they engage in metalinguistic discourse, realigning the ideologies in different ways, based on their metapragmatic understanding of the discursive context. Indeed, as many researchers have shown, ideologies that are commonly perceived to be contradictory may often emerge as compatible depending on the discursive environment (Philips 2004). This point is of particular relevance to

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the context of debates. Because debates are commonly perceived to be adversarial in nature, it is often assumed that opposing parties in a debate will be motivated by and will hold opposing ideologies. However, in many cases, the distribution of ideologies in a debate does not necessarily align with the fault lines of social positions, but instead shows what I call ideology pooling, where both sides of a debate draw upon a common set of socially shared ideologies despite differences in their political orientations (see also Ricento 2000). This is indeed a phenomenon that has been observed in many contexts. For example, Sonntag and Pool (1987) show that both sides of debates on minority languages and dialects in the United States often display common ideological assumptions, such as problematizing minority-language monolinguals and treating language as a necessary and sufficient means for success in the U.S. society. Also, Palozzi (2006) writes that, based on his analysis of U.S. voters’ attitudes towards language policy issues, “it is possible for people who subscribe to what may seem opposing ideologies to actually have much in common at fundamental levels of belief.” (p. 34). Of course, this does not mean that differences in the ideological positions between both sides of the debate are neutralized; parties to a debate will still actively adopt strategies that will promote and justify the ideologies that support their social positions and interests. But such choices are also constrained by the fact that some ideologies become socially dominant to the extent that they become a natural part of discourse production; in such cases, speakers may (consciously or unconsciously) adopt those ideologies into their discourse, even though the ideologies may not necessarily be supportive of their interest. For example, Petrovic (2005) suggests, following Macedo, Dendrinos and Gounari (2003), that the political ideology of neoliberalism may have become a dominant discourse which constrains the way we come to talk about the value of languages, leading the supporters of linguistic pluralism to adopt the rhetoric of “language as resource,” even though it is a stance which, he argues, could ultimately undermine their very effort by being in line with a neoconservative ideology representing the inequitable status quo.3 This ideology pooling can also be observed in the Korean Official English debate. Based on the description of the three ideologies above, it may appear that the ideologies of necessitation and externalization closely align with the arguments and positions of the proponents and opponents of making English an official language, respectively. In addition, since Koreans’ incompetence in English was commonly invoked to argue for the need to make English an official language, it may also be seen as an ideology that supports the proponents of officializing English. However, a close inspection of the texts shows that the three ideologies of English are manifest in the texts of both sides of the debate. While it is true that each side strongly emphasized the ideology that was closely

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aligned with their position, all three ideologies functioned to constrain and delimit the arguments made by both sides, and were rarely challenged explicitly. This suggests that these ideologies are not circulated independently, but together as an ideological complex, representing a broad conceptualization of English that is shared among the participants in the debate. Let us first look at the ideology of necessitation. While this ideology forms an important basis for the arguments in favor of officializing English, the opponents of official English never actually refute the view of English as a necessity in global context and in Korean society. That is, they still recognize the importance of English, and do not deny the need for it in Korean society. In the following example, Kim Yeongmyeong, one of the most outspoken critics of English as an official language, acknowledges that English is indeed important for many purposes. In outlining the reasons why Koreans try to learn English, he says: (5)

hananeun pilyoe ttaleun geosida. gukjesahoee jeokeunghagi wihayeo, jeonmun gongbuhagi wihayeo, oegukmunhwaleul ikhigi wihayeo, muyeokhagi wihayeo, gwangwangsaeope jongsahagi wihayeo deungdeung. geuligo hakgyona hoesaeseo yoguhani geu pilyoe ttaleugi wihayeo deungdeung. ileohan gaeinjeok pilyoui dwieneun yeongeoga muljiljeok iikgwa hyoyongeul gajyeoondaneun ilbanjeokin yeongeo gineungloni beotigo issda. ileohan yeongeoui hyoyonggwa pilyoleul buinhal salameun eopsda. munjeneun geu pilyoga gwajangdoeeo doga jinachigo bandeusi pilyochi anheun salamdeulegedo ileul gangyohageona yeongeoleul an hamyeon chaeyongdoeji mos hageona dwitteoleojindago hyeopbakhago bulangameul joseonghandaneunde issda. [One is based on need: in order to adapt to the international society, to study in a specialized field, to learn about foreign cultures, for trade, to work in the tourist industry, and to fulfill the requirements at school or the workplace, etc. Underlying these individual needs is the widespread instrumentalism of English, in which English is believed to bring material profit and usefulness. No one would deny this usefulness and need. The problem is that this need is exaggerated to the extent that English is forced upon those who do not necessarily need it, and that people are intimidated into feeling that they will not get jobs or will fall behind if they don’t learn English.] (Kim Yeongmyeong 2000: 178)

Here, it is clear that Kim’s acknowledgment of the importance of English is a concessive rhetorical move (Couper-Kuhlen and Thompson 2000), since he subsequently proceeds to point out that Koreans’ obsession over English is excessive and unreasonable even in this context. However, we can also note that

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the necessity of English is still recognized and left unchallenged; it is only the “exaggeration” of such need that is questioned by Kim. Similarly, while the ideology of externalization is most clearly instantiated in the texts that criticize officialization of English, it can also be found in the discourse of those in favor of it. As discussed above, one discursive strategy adopted by people such as literary critic Jung Gwari and political scientist Hahm Jaebong in defending Bok’s position was to claim that his arguments are not necessarily at odds with allegiance to a Korean identity. For instance, Hahm (1998) claims that Bok argues for the adoption of English so that Koreans can “do nationalism better,” as it will help Korea to find a better way to use and localize the advanced ideas of the West and to benefit Koreans. Such strategies show that these writers do not treat the ideology of nationalism (however defined) as something that they should attack, but see it as a resource for strengthening the appeal of their claims. Likewise, in talking about English, they do not deny the foreignness of English, but in fact sometimes highlight this quality of English in their arguments. Thus, Jung Gwari writes: (6)

jungyohan munjeneun tainui doguleul hwalyonghamyeonseo etteohge jasinui yeoksajeok gyeongheomgwa munhwajeok yusaneul geogie saegyeoneoheo siljiljeokin jegeoshwaleul dalseonghaneunyaiji, mueoseul seontaekhal geosingaui munjega anida. [The important question is, how can we adopt the tools of the Other, inscribe our historical experience and cultural heritage in it, and make it usefully our own? This is not a question of which [tool] we will choose.] (Jung 1998)

Here, English is identified as the “tool of the Other,” and the process of adopting it is framed as a way of making it “usefully our own.” While this clearly takes a pragmatic stance by limiting the issue of language choice to an instrumental concern, it also underlines that English is indeed “not our own.” We can note how Jung contrasts English with “our historical experience and cultural heritage,” and how, as a tool, English cannot be immediately put to use to express Koreans’ culture and identity without any modification; the long process of “making it our own” is necessary for it to work for Koreans, due to the foreignness of the language. Again, this is clearly a concessive move, as Jung goes on to point out that to refuse the tool of English is not an option. However, it is also clear that English is constructed as a language that contrasts with the notion of Koreanness – and the ideology of externalization remains uncontested.

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The fact that the ideologies of English are actually shared by both parties can be shown even more dramatically when we look at the ideology of selfdeprecation, for some critics of officializing English can be seen as actively using self-deprecation as an important logical basis for their claims, just as their opponents do. For example, we have seen above that people such as Han Hakseong argue that what Korea really needs is significant reform of the country’s English language education system rather than putting English into everyday use, for the latter is impractical given the fact that Koreans simply cannot speak English. Han’s criticism, then, clearly hinges upon the presupposition that Koreans lack the ability to use English appropriately, just as Bok’s proposal does. This can be seen, for instance, in the following quotation from his book. (7)

yeongeoui baleum chegyeleul jedaelo moleugoseoneun yeongmiini naeneun solileul aladeuleulsu eopseumyeo, geugeosui baleum chegyee majji anhge yeongeoleul malhamyeon geu maleul yeongmiini aladeuleul su eopsda. ulinalaeseo yeongeo gyoyuki jedaelo sihaengdoeji mos haessdaneun geoseun balo hangukinduli yeongeoui baleum chegyeleul jedaelo hunlyeonbatji mos haessdaneun geoseul uimihamyeo, hangukindeuli 10nyeon dongan yeongeoleul gongbuhagodo mal hanmadi mos handaneun munjejeom yeoksi mueosbodado yeongeoui baleum chegyeleul molla yeongeo solileul jedaelo aladeuleul su eopsdaneun de giinhanda. [Without fully understanding the sound system of English, one cannot understand the pronunciation of British or American speakers. Without speaking English according to its sound system, one will not be understood by British or American speakers. Because Korea’s English education has been inadequate, Koreans have not been trained properly in the sound system of English. Likewise, the problem of Koreans not being able to speak a word even after learning English for 10 years is a result of the fact that they cannot hear the sounds of English as they do not understand its sound system, above all else.] (Han Hakseong 2000: 91–92)

Here, Han states that Koreans are unable to understand the pronunciation of native speakers of English, nor are they understood by them. We can point out several problems here, such as his selection of British or American speakers (yeongmiin) as the standard of comparison against which one’s English pronunciation and comprehension should be evaluated. But what we should notice here is the strong generalizations he makes about Koreans’ English ability. It would not be the case that mutual comprehension is totally impossible between Koreanized English on the one hand and British or American English on the other,

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and it is certainly not the case that Koreans who learned English under the Korean education system will never be able to communicate with those traditional native-speaker varieties of English. Yet, we see here strong generalization that denies that any Korean who has passed through the Korean education system could possibly gain meaningful competence in English. Of course, we can again understand Han’s description above as a strategy for underlining the problems with Korea’s formal education system rather than an objective analysis he might produce as a scholar in other contexts. But still, the way he presents Koreans’ failure to gain successful communicative ability in English as an obvious, natural fact deserves mention. Particularly noticeable in this regard is Han’s statement that “Koreans are unable to speak a word even after learning English for 10 years.” This is in fact another extremely common trope in Korean discourses of English (along with encounters with an English-speaking foreigner on the street; see section 3.1). Based on the fact that a typical college-educated Korean adult (in the time of Han’s writing) would have received 6 years of English education in middle school and high school, and an additional 4 years in college, this expression is frequently invoked in a wide range of contexts to describe the inability of Koreans to learn English successfully. (Incidentally, the use of “10 years” here overlaps with popular Korean sayings such as sipnyeonimyeon gangsando byeonhanda “after 10 years, even rivers and mountains change,” which intertextually attributes meaning of great time depth to the phrase “10 years.”) Again, we can see here that the variation in English ability that must exist among Koreans is erased, and more importantly, the fact that some Koreans do manage to become successful learners of English even under the Korean formal curriculum is clearly denied. The fact that Han invokes such generalized and broadly circulated caricatures of Koreans’ failure in learning English points to the ideology of self-deprecation; a careful justification of such a sweeping account, which we might expect from a book by a specialist in English language teaching, is notably absent. Instead, Koreans’ inability in English is simply presented as a given; it is treated as a transparent, unquestionable fact that requires no substantiation. These examples show that it is problematic to assume that the ideologies of necessitation and self-deprecation were adopted only by the supporters of English as an official language, and that the ideology of externalization was adopted only by its opponents. While the oppositional nature of the debate led its participants to highlight particular ideological aspects of their opponents’ and their own position, textual evidence suggests that both sides drew upon the same set of ideologies in their discourse, and that the three ideologies should be understood as forming a shared ideological complex of English. But of course, this does not mean that the opposition between the two parties in the debate

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was just an illusion and that underlyingly they were all in agreement with each other. It was indeed significant that the discursive event was conceptualized as oppositional discourse, as it functioned as a metapragmatic constraint on how the ideological complex of English actually emerged through the texts of the debate, thus serving as a window through which social interests of participants could enter into discourse. In the next section, I will explore this issue in detail by looking at the way the conservative press framed the debate politically and discursively through its pages. 4.2. Framing the debate as politicized opposition In the section above, I pointed out that debates are generally imagined to be an adversarial form of discourse, in which parties with opposing agendas and interests collide over an issue. Perhaps a stereotypical image of a debate is one in which there are two parties, with diametrically opposing interests, who clash to defend and promote their version of “the truth,” a popular conception that has been noted by many authors (e.g. Tannen 1999). As a discursive site, then, we may say that debates are subject to a particular type of metapragmatic constraint in that its discourse tends to be produced and interpreted with respect to this oppositional dichotomy, despite the complexity that may exist in the dynamics among its participants. This was particularly so for the Official English debate, for there is evidence that shows Chosun Ilbo, especially during the initial phase of the debate, actively framed the debate as a highly oppositional one. The term nonjaeng ‘debate,’ which in Korean carries a much stronger sense of aggressiveness (the Sino-Korean term has the literal meaning of ‘argument-fight’) than the English term ‘debate,’ was used by Chosun Ilbo from the very beginning of the debate. For example, the first article that criticized Bok’s proposal, written by Nam Yeongsin (1998), was introduced by a note in which the editorial staff says, “after Mr. Bok’s argument was reported in Chosun Ilbo, an impending fierce debate among intellectuals can be foreseen.” This not only predefines who will participate in the debate (sikja ‘intellectual’) but states in advance that the discussion of the issue will be a “fierce debate” (gyeoklyeolhan nonjaeng). Another Chosun Ilbo article, which provided an interim summary of the initial exchange, said, “nationalism was indeed a strong, explosive detonator (noegwan) that was inherent in the intellectual flow of our society [. . . ] This detonator struck the intellectual society with an enormous force, and developed into a pro-con debate (chanban nonjaeng)” (Gim 1998a). Again, the debate is identified in a manner similar to the previous one, and the metaphor of explosion further underlines the implication of intense contestation already inherent in the term nonjaeng.

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Also, Chosun Ilbo presented the essays of the initial exchange in a particular way that a sense of opposition may be highlighted. The newspaper published the essays so that they would alternate between one that supports and one that opposes officialization of English – thereby presenting itself as a neutral facilitator who gives equal coverage to both sides, but at the same time constructing two clearly distinguishable sides that oppose each other. Usually the headlines of the articles would clearly classify the writer’s position as either supporting or opposing officialization of English, even though not all articles were unambiguously devoted to one position. More importantly, the two sides were presented not only as clearly distinguishable and oppositional, but also as representing conflicting political ideologies. We have noted above that the critics of making English an official language came from a wide range of perspectives, to the extent that it was difficult to put them into a single political position; but despite this fact, in the debate they were simply grouped together as the “nationalist camp” (minjokjuui jinyeong) – a term with strong political connotations (as well as military ones, as jinyeong commonly refers to a military encampment). The differences among the proponents of officializing English were similarly ignored as well. This shows that Chosun Ilbo actively constructed the debate as a clash between two opposing political forces by highlighting intergroup distinctions and erasing intragroup differences using various resources (Bucholtz and Hall 2004). Chosun Ilbo’s strategy of framing the debate as oppositional and highly politicized can be seen as closely tied to the political goals of the newspaper; as noted above, setting up a distinction between libertarians and nationalists was a useful way of highlighting the political implications that Bok’s proposal had for Korean conservatives. On another level, it also served the purpose of sensationalizing the debate and drawing more attention from potential readers and society in general. But due to the large circulation of the newspaper, this framing turned out to be influential, for it persisted in the later phases of the debate as well, in which the debate still continued to be called the yeongeo gongyonghwa nonjaeng ‘English officialization debate,’ retaining the term nonjaeng and its sense of opposition. Thus it becomes important for us to consider the discursive effects of this strategic choice to semiotically construct the event as an adversarial and political exchange. One effect of this framing of the debate was the drastic oversimplification of the range of issues involved, as we have discussed above. But there was another important consequence of this framing. The understanding of the debate as a politicized battle between parties also served as a metapragmatic constraint for the debate, leading the two “sides” of the debate, now constructed in oppositional terms, to articulate the three ideologies in different ways.

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Because the debate was framed as a political clash between “(neo)liberals” and “nationalists”, the debate was consequently conceptualized as a contestation between the ideologies of necessitation and externalization, which were seen as ideologies that connect with each of the two clashing political positions, respectively. For this reason, ideologies of necessitation and externalization were frequently highlighted, either as an important basis for one’s arguments, or as a belief against which one’s ideas were to be pitted. It is also likely that this formulation of the ideologies of necessitation and externalization as oppositional ideologies was influenced by the common conceptualization of globalization and nationalism being at odds, which is frequently found in popular discourses of globalization and the spread of English (Crystal 1999). Despite studies that show globalization necessarily works simultaneously with processes of localization (hence Robertson’s (1992) term glocalization), these two processes are frequently seen as being in tension, as conflicting pressures that push towards opposite directions. The framing of the Official English debate may have been further strengthened by such discourses. Thus, even though both of these ideologies were shared to a large extent by both sides, the adversarial view of the debate resulted in highlighting the potentially conflicting sense of these ideologies. In other words, necessitation and externalization were represented as shared but contestable ideologies. In contrast, the third ideology, self-deprecation, was never treated as an ideology relevant to political contestation that defined the debate. For instance, questions regarding what exactly is meant by statements such as “learning English in Korea is very inefficient” or “Koreans cannot speak English” were rarely raised in the debate. One reason for this may have been that matters of linguistic competence are often seen as objective, measurable “facts,” rather than issues that are subject to political debate. Even though this ideology served as an important basis for the arguments in favor of English as an official language, this was never treated as an ideology that “belongs” to the supporters of officializing English. Thus, even writers who criticized the idea of making English an official language still actively drew upon this ideology to support their own arguments, as we have seen in example (7) above. In other words, self-deprecation was rarely invoked in oppositional terms, and was thus never framed as a matter for contestation in the debate. That is, self-deprecation was represented as a shared and uncontestable ideology. This gave a particular status to this ideology, strongly naturalizing the incompetence of Koreans and making it hidden, in the sense that it was not treated as an issue to be debated. Occasionally, there were authors who argued for the validity of Koreans’ English ability by pointing out that Koreans’ competence in English should not be seen in such a problematic light. However, even in these arguments, the

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authors still stop short of denying Koreans’ imagined incompetence in English. This can be illustrated through example (8) below, taken from a book by Cho Dong-Il, a scholar of comparative literature. Here, Cho discusses the relationship between English and doing scholarly research, and argues that Koreans should stop worrying about their English, as language of research is merely packaging for intellectual content; instead, they would be better off investing their efforts in developing new ideas to share with the world. This position is reflected in the following quotation. (8)

bakkeulo naga hwaldonghal ttae nonmunui jili yeongeo gusaneunglyeokboda deouk ginyohada. yeongeo jogigyoyukeul seoduleugo yeongeoleul gongyongeolo sayonghamyeon nonmunui jili hyangsangdoeneun geoseun anida. . . . yeongeoleul deo jal hago nonmunui jildo hancheung naajineun geosi johda. geuleona dul da hankkeobeone balagineun eolyeoun geosi sasilida. [In working on the international stage, quality of research papers is more important than competence in English. Promoting early English education and using English as an official language does not improve the quality of research papers. . . . It would be great to both use better English and produce research papers of better quality. However, it is a fact that it is difficult to ask for both at the same time.] (Cho Dong-Il 2001: 216–217)

By assigning secondary importance to English as the language of international academic exchange, Cho refutes arguments that Korea’s lack of English ability is an insurmountable hindrance to participating in the global stage. He thereby refuses to treat Koreans’ purported incompetence as a problem, thus resisting illegitimation of Koreans as speakers of English. However, it is important to note here that the idea that Koreans cannot speak English well is still left unchallenged. The ability to speak English fluently and the ability to develop new ideas are presented as being at odds (“it is difficult to ask for both at the same time”), and Koreans’ lack of the former is thus seen as a liability. Consequently, their inability in English is still treated as something that could potentially hold them back in the global stage (when compared to native speakers of English who could excel at both English and content), which must be compensated for through development of unique scholarly contributions. In other words, while Cho attempts to challenge the aspect of illegitimation inherent in self-deprecation, he ultimately fails to question the construction of Koreans as incompetent speakers of English. Examples like these show how the ideology of self-deprecation bypasses contestation, unlike the other two ideologies. Given that the proposal for mak-

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ing English an official language was based upon the belief that Koreans seriously lack competence in English, it is imaginable that this differential representation of ideologies had a significant influence on the way English was constructed through the debate. Represented as an uncontestable ideology, self-deprecation lends more credence to the proposal to officialize English, because when juxtaposed with the ideology of necessitation, incompetence in English can be interpreted as a serious problem that transcends political interests, thereby creating a sort of linguistic moral panic, in which a sense of urgency is created and the need for some kind of action is imagined. Thus, while the imagined tension between neoliberal globalization and national identity is conveyed through the constructed opposition between necessitation and externalization, the third ideology of self-deprecation, by virtue of being framed as a factual and unquestionable reality of Koreans’ competence, becomes an unavoidable thorn that reminds Koreans of their limited English. And this alone is already sufficient to produce the image of English as a hegemonic language; against the backdrop of the anxiety that self-deprecation produces, resistant forces against the global hegemony of English and the new social order it represents quickly lose their persuasive power, even for people who may not necessarily wish to subscribe to the tenets of neoliberal globalization. In short, the analysis presented in this chapter suggests that, in the Official English debate, mechanisms of metalinguistic discourse were critical in reproducing a hegemonic vision of English and globalization. I showed that this process took place not only through putting metalinguistic statements that articulate the interests of powerful actors into broad circulation, but also through the way interested parties exerted control over discourse – more specifically, the terms according to which the discursive nature of the debate would be understood. This metapragmatic understanding, which framed the debate as politicized opposition, was largely shaped and defined by the strategic discursive choices of the conservative press and their supporters, who had large stakes in the neoliberal order of economic globalization. In this context, a wide array of concerns regarding officialization of English were quickly politicized and thus framed as partial views that are contestable, while more fundamental ideological assumptions central to the argument in favor of officializing English, particularly the claim that Koreans lack good competence in English, were reified as “fact”. In other words, metapragmatic constraints gave rise to particular manifestations of the ideological complex of English, thus determining the specific image of English that would be highlighted and emphasized through the debate. Constraints of metalinguistic discourse, in this sense, channel interests and social positions of actors into discursive practices, by shaping and constraining how people may engage in the process of discourse production. And this is how the Official En-

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glish debate served as a site for ideology reproduction – not just by functioning as a place for discussing language policy and exchanging arguments, but by realigning the ambivalent ideological complex of English into a configuration that reflects more closely the interests inherent in the changing conditions of the global world.

5. Conclusion In this chapter, I have identified the Korean Official English debate as a site for ideology reproduction through an analysis of its political context and discursive patterns. Against the backdrop of the financial crisis that had painfully etched in the psyche of the nation the changing realities of the new global economy, the debate served as a site where participants contested, through the mediation of language ideologies, the question of what it means for Korea to be part of the global world. While the debate echoed various themes that were articulated through similar debates in other Asian countries, such as the dilemma between globalization and nationalism, its complexity transcended what could be captured by simple dichotomies. This is because the debate, like any instance of localization of global discourse, was situated within a complex net of specific interests and political positions of local actors, thus firmly rooted in local context, instantiating a contestation over local imaginations of the global (Appadurai 1996, Hall 1997). In the discussion above, we focused particularly on the role of the conservative press and jaebeol corporations whose interests it represented. As powerful actors with clear interests, they exerted considerable influence on how discourses of English as an international language took shape locally. This was particularly so within the Official English debate, a discursive event that was largely initiated and controlled by the conservative press. Thus, in the discourse of the debate, the dual pressures of globalization and nationalism, for instance, were locally reframed as a political opposition, which in turn served a range of political purposes, such as defining and homogenizing critics of the conservative status quo; borrowing the modern indexicality of English to justify neoliberal globalization; and naturalizing ideological views of Koreans as lacking the crucial resource of English. This process demonstrates how powerful actors may intervene in the process of localization of global discourses through their power of authoritative entextualization (Blommaert 1999b; Silverstein and Urban 1996) to reinforce particular social relations that atribute power to those actors in the first place. This can help us explain why, despite strong opposition towards officializing English, the hegemony of English was not successfully challenged through

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the debate. The point here is not that the critics of making English an official language failed to uncover the inherent problems in the proposal to officialize English – a task several critics have accomplished, in fact, with eloquence. The point, instead, is that ideological construction of English occurs through a complex process in which interests of involved parties and mechanisms of metalinguistic discourse are intertwined. Reproduction of language ideologies must be mediated through metalinguistic discourse, which constructs and molds sitespecific constraints on how discourse may be produced and understood within that site. For this reason, the Official English debate, in which control over such constraints was largely dominated by the conservative press, was an important site through which the ideological complex of English could be reconfigured to localize the global hegemony of English, overriding potential discourses of opposition. But at the same time, the Official English debate is not an isolated site. While this chapter has focused on the analysis of site-specific workings of language ideologies in the debate, this site is also linked to other discursive sites in Korean context through interdiscursive chains. In particular, given the broad circulation of the texts of the debate through mainstream media, representations of language ideologies in the debate must have been a powerful source for reproduction of these ideologies across various other sites. For instance, as we have seen above, the texts of the debate reproduced the dominant tropes of self-deprecation in various forms – such as the image of Koreans who become embarrassed when approached by an English-speaking foreigner on the street, or statements such as “Koreans cannot speak a word of English even after learning it for 10 years” – thereby serving as a locus for their circulation. Thus, the Official English debate becomes an important link in the interdiscursive chain through which ideologies of English are circulated and strengthened. An interesting question for us to ask, then, is: how does the image of English as a hegemonic language, which reflects the interests of dominant social agents and is reproduced through discursive sites such as the Official English debate, extend into other sites that escape direct control of such powerful actors? How are such dominant discourses taken up, contested, or resisted in alternative sites, where site-specific metapragmatic constraints may differ significantly? In the following chapters, we move on to a discussion of metalinguistic discourse in some of these other sites to seek that connection.

Chapter 4 Playing with English: Language ideologies in Korean-English yumeo 1. Cross-linguistic humor as metalinguistic discourse If the site that we studied in the previous chapter was one that is popularly perceived as serious and contentious, the site that we will look at in this chapter may be maximally different from it. In this chapter, we turn to a non-serious and playful form of Korean discourse: self-contained texts of language play that make use of English for humorous purposes, including jokes, riddles, and humorous accounts of experience, which I collectively call Korean-English yumeo (‘humor’). Of course, to differentiate these sites or discourse types as being serious vs. casual, or contentious vs. playful, etc., can be misleading. While people commonly classify different discourse genres as being political or mundane, such a distinction may be more artificial than it appears to be, as the political must be realized through the mundane, and structures within the mundane must have consequences for political life. Nonetheless, the fact that people usually regard humor as mundane and non-political is not trivial, because, as I will suggest through this chapter, it is precisely such metapragmatic understanding which allows playful language use to function as a powerful site for the reproduction of ideologies. Cross-linguistic humor, or humor that involves more than two languages or dialects, of which Korean-English yumeo is one example, is an extremely productive site for investigating language ideologies. Cross-linguistic humor can be seen as a powerful type of metalinguistic commentary; it touches upon the relative status and stereotypes of languages and their users, speakers’ beliefs about the structure of languages, perceived norms of language use, and the meanings of their violations. For example, by studying Korean-English yumeo to understand how English is deployed for humorous effect or how targets of jokes are depicted with respect to their ability in English, we are able to extract Koreans’ beliefs about what it means to use English and what expectations Koreans hold regarding an average Korean person’s ability in English. Such analyses can then serve as a potentially useful basis for investigating the ways speakers come to accept the social meaning of English and their relationship to English in the world. There is indeed a great body of research on cross-linguistic humor. A large number of studies from various traditions have explored a wide range of func-

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tions that cross-linguistic humor may serve within a community. For example, researchers have proposed that such humor might have the effect of releasing aggressive feelings towards another group (e.g. Fijian/Hindi codeswitching, Siegel 1995); releasing feelings of anxiety produced by hostile surroundings (e.g. Spanish/English Chicano humor, Reyna and Herrera-Sobek 1998); expressing resistance towards a dominating, authoritative discourse (e.g. parodic use of Putonghua by Tibetans, Makley 1998); boundary-leveling as a means of overcoming ethnic and linguistic tension (e.g. Castilian/Catalan codeswitching, Woolard 1988); or maintaining a culture’s values and integrity through marking and emphasizing an outgroup’s “Otherness” (e.g. mocking parodies of Anglo Americans by Apache speakers, Basso 1979). These studies underline that cross-linguistic humor primarily plays with boundaries between languages (or speakers of those different languages), allowing its users to contest or maintain such boundaries, either by resisting oppressive distinctions or reinforcing/downplaying difference. Other studies on cross-linguistic humor have focused more explicitly on the issue of power and dominance. These typically deal with the humor of a dominant mainstream majority group commenting on the language of a dominated minority group, such as studies that look at “Ebonics humor” (Ronkin and Karn 1999; Rickford and Rickford 2000) and “Mock Spanish” (Hill 1993, 2001) in the United States. These studies identify the mockery of minority languages/dialects as a racist and oppressive act; there, the focus of analysis is how such humor perpetuates negative ethnic stereotypes and unequal social relationships. The oppressive relationship between the two groups and the way humor is deployed to mask and maintain that relationship, it can be argued, are the primary dynamics of these forms of humor. This suggests that cross-linguistic humor can be an important site for investigating the reproduction of social inequality as well. This focus on the question of power and dominance is particularly relevant to Korean-English yumeo. While Korea is not a “minority” community that is directly subsumed and dominated under a “majority” community (say, the United States), Korean-English yumeo can be seen as making sense of and commenting on the relationship between the global hegemony of English and its local reality. In this sense, Korean-English yumeo is a configuration opposite to cases such as Ebonics humor or Mock Spanish, where the cross-linguistic humor of a hegemonic group comments on its relationship to a dominated group. What kind of effect, then, may cross-linguistic humor of a local group have on global level structures of power? Linguistic humor is frequently thought of as an artistic and creative form, something to be praised and celebrated as a display of the profoundness of aesthetic human capacity. Thus, humor of dominated groups tends to be romanticized as a sign of “the ineffectiveness of systems

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of power and of the resilience and creativity of the human spirit in its refusal to be dominated,” as Abu-Lughod has commented on the romanticization of resistance in anthropological literature (1990: 42). However, like resistance, humor is not simply a romantic act of self-expression in which people engage to feel good about themselves. It is also subject to constraints of power, in that it utilizes semiotic resources that are given meaning within systems of power, and it is therefore not simply a lofty form of language use that hovers above the system of social relationships. Thus, as researchers we must be careful not to fall into such romanticization and be able to take a broader social perspective in studying cross-linguistic humor of dominated local groups. This point is emphasized by Billig (2001), who argues that research on humor often takes a “celebratory stance” which lauds humor’s creativeness at the cost of failing to reveal its role in social problems such as prejudice and hatred. While addressed towards research that downgrades the role of humor in concealing the bigotry of oppressors, Billig’s concern is clearly relevant to research on the humor of dominated local groups as well. To be more specific, we should be aware of the possibility that cross-linguistic humor may have “unintended consequences” (Giddens 1984) of contributing to the maintenance of oppressive power relationships, while simultaneously having a creative, artistic, psychological, and resistant effect as well. For instance, the classic study by Paul Willis (1977) has pointed out how the resistant practices that British working class youths employ towards the authority of the school serve as a way of affirming their working class male identity, but at the same time, eventually result in reproducing their oppression, because those practices also have the effect of limiting the youths’ future options to working class jobs with bleak prospects. We should therefore also ask whether in some cases local cross-linguistic humor might unwittingly contribute to the maintenance and reproduction of global hegemonic structures. Humor, like any other form of language use, does not occur outside of social context, and at least in part would index the relationships of power that surround its users, and thus has the potential to reproduce such relationships. Moreover, the operation of power indexed through humor is often covert in that humor presents itself as non-serious and common-sensical (Billig 2001; Hill 2001) so that it may work to deny the existence of oppression and discrimination (van Dijk 1992). For this reason, humor is an important site through which relations of power may come to be misrecognized as legitimate (Bourdieu 1991), a critical step in the construction of hegemony. Approaching cross-linguistic humor from the perspective of language ideology can help us investigate such consequences. Studying cross-linguistic humor as a place where implicit comments on language and social organization are

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made (that is, as a locus for the articulation of language ideologies) can help us understand such humor as a critical site where structures of power are maintained and reproduced. As language ideology can be seen as a justification and rationalization of language structure and use, and also of their underlying social organization, looking at how speakers construct the relative status and social meaning of languages through humor can help us see how dominated speakers, while contesting and questioning their oppression, nevertheless may play a role in the reproduction of power relationships that constrain their lives. In this chapter, I will show that this is precisely the case for Korean-English yumeo, as it may serve as a site for the reproduction of ideologies that advance the hegemony of English within Korean society. In the following sections, I first provide a general description of Korean-English yumeo and an outline of its broad subtypes. Next, I move on to an analysis of Korean-English yumeo, focusing on several asymmetries in the discursive organization that can be observed from the data. Based on this analysis, I will discuss how these asymmetries, along with the popular metapragmatic understanding of yumeo as non-serious discourse, give rise to a particular manifestation of the ideological complex of English, emphasizing certain ideologies over others and contributing to the power of English in Korean society.

2. Korean-English yumeo as data The term yumeo, which happens to be a loan word from English (from humor, and pronounced [jum2]), refers not only to cross-linguistic humor, but to any kind of humorous text such as jokes, riddles, and other amusing stories that is relatively self-contained and highly circulable. Incidentally, it is not a term that is used much in spoken language – the usual term for a joke is simply usgineun yaegi ‘funny story’, as in usigineun yaegi hana hae julkka? ‘Shall I tell you a funny story? (i.e. Want to hear a joke?)’. The term yumeo is used, though, to refer to such ‘funny stories’ collectively; for example, an Internet bulletin board that collects such ‘funny stories’ would be called a yumeo gesipan ‘yumeo bulletin board’. The data studied in this chapter are collections of yumeo that involve both Korean and English, or at least make some reference to English. This type of yumeo I am collectively calling ‘Korean-English yumeo’. The use of English in yumeo is not a new phenomenon; some of the examples in my database have been in circulation as early as the 1970s, and others possibly even longer. It is probably true that Korean-English yumeo is most popular among adolescents

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and young adults, especially college students, as is the case with yumeo in general. However, this does not mean Korean-English yumeo is used and enjoyed exclusively by those groups or is specifically associated with them. Middle-aged speakers engage in such yumeo as well, and comedians deliver such jokes on television programs aimed at a general audience. This suggests that most Koreans at least have access to and can appreciate Korean-English yumeo, though of course there will also be much individual and intergroup differences. The analysis of this chapter is based on data collected between 1997 and 2002, which come from two different sources. First, I collected instances of KoreanEnglish yumeo that I encountered through my interaction with or observation of Korean speakers, recording their contents as field notes. While one might expect that the telling of Korean-English yumeo might occur more frequently in contexts of English-related tasks, such as in English classes, my observations suggest that this is not particularly the case. In fact, most cases where I did observe the telling of Korean-English yumeo were in contexts that had nothing to do with English; it seems that the natural context for telling Korean-English yumeo is casual conversational settings where jokes are normally exchanged, though English-related contexts may trigger the use of Korean-English yumeo as well. Another source of data was the Internet. I collected instances of KoreanEnglish yumeo from various “yumeo bulletin boards.” I performed searches of board postings using the keyword yeongeo ‘English,’and monitored the resulting search content to collect instances of Korean-English yumeo. The boards that I used were part of major Korean portal sites and Internet media outlets, and thus were popular sites on the Internet with a high number of visitors, ensuring that I get a reasonably representative sample of the kind of yumeo that general Internet users are commonly exposed to on the Internet. There did not appear to be a significant difference in the content between different boards, as users would often copy instances of yumeo they enjoyed and post them onto other boards (this practice is known as peogagi ‘scooping up’; Internet users usually mark such copies with the addition of the word peom ‘scooped up’ on the subject line). The data collected through observation and through the Internet show that there is great intertextuality between the two modes of consuming yumeo. While some forms of Korean-English yumeo are unique to the medium of the Internet and there are some necessary differences in the way yumeo can be delivered in person and online (see section 3 below), many instances of yumeo are often circulated in both spoken (conversation) and written (online) modes. Moreover, the Internet now functions as an important site through which many people learn new examples of yumeo that they may later share with others through

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conversation; for instance, inteoneseseo bon yaeginde. . . ‘this is something I saw on the Internet. . . ’ is not an unusual way to preface a performance of yumeo nowadays. Thus, for the purpose of this study, instances of Korean-English yumeo collected from both sources could be seen as forming a coherent set of data that reflected the range of cross-linguistic humor generally employed by Koreans – rather than two distinct types of data. Indeed, as I will show below, the underlying ideologies of English reflected in the data are manifest both in the yumeo collected through the Internet and through observation of interaction. The database contained over 140 unique instances of Korean-English yumeo. It should be noted that there were many overlapping tokens between the collection from observation and that from the Internet, and also among different bulletin boards; for this reason, the actual number of tokens that I have encountered is much larger than 140. This is remarkable considering the fact that we rarely find instances of Korean cross-linguistic yumeo involving a language other than English. (For example, even though Koreans frequently believe they have much familiarity with Japanese, a language that has great typological similarity with Korean, cross-linguistic humor involving Japanese is not common when compared with ones involving English.) This suggests that Korean-English yumeo has much cultural significance, and presents us with a useful set of data through which we can observe ideologies of language at work. On the one hand, the presence of Korean-English yumeo as a category is a reflection of the position of English in Korea; as a language that Koreans commonly encounter through education and popular culture, English is simply a readily available linguistic resource that can be easily employed to create playful forms of language. Also, as an important topic that pervades people’s everyday lives, English is also something that they might want to joke about – either to release the tension that they are experiencing due to pressures of English language learning, or, again, just because it is a common topic that they talk about all the time anyway. On the other hand, Korean-English yumeo is more than just a reflection of the status of English. By engaging in Korean-English yumeo, speakers are also reproducing the ideologies that condition English to become an important presence in Korea. In the remainder of this chapter, we will discuss how the ideological complex of English and its elements are manifest in the data, and how the highly circulable form of yumeo may allow Korean-English yumeo to serve as a powerful site for the reproduction of ideologies of English.

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3. A typology of Korean-English yumeo Before moving on to an analysis of language ideologies in Korean-English yumeo, I present an overview of the different types of yumeo in the data, in order to show the reader the range of existing forms of Korean-English yumeo, and also the range of linguistic phenomena that may be involved. It should be noted that these are not meant to be clear-cut or exhaustive categories, and that I am presenting them here to provide a reference point for the analysis to be presented in the sections to follow. 3.1. Translation riddles This type of yumeo takes the form of a riddle, or a riddle joke, to use Sherzer’s (2002) term. Here, the recipient is given the task of translating a Korean phrase or sentence into English, or vice versa; the “correct” answer, which the recipient is not supposed to know, and which is provided by the original questioner, is an absurd, unexpected one, thus humorous. A typical format used in face-to-face interaction is X leul yeongeolo mwolago hage? ‘How do you say X in English?’ in the case of translating from Korean to English, or X ga mwuseun tteusige? ‘What does X mean?’ in the case of English to Korean. These formats can be seen in the examples below.4 (9)

Q:

“naneun jajeongeoleul mos tanda”leul yeongeolo mwolago hage? ‘How do you say “I cannot ride a bicycle” in English?’ A: Motorcycle [moth asaikh Wl]. cf. na-neun jajeongeo-leul mos ta-nda I-TOP bicycle-OBJ NEG ride-DECL ‘I cannot ride a bicycle.’ [mo th a saikh Wl] mos ta saikeul NEG ride cycle

Example (9) is a translation riddle which asks for an English translation of a Korean sentence. While the Korean sentence naneun jajeongeoleul mos tanda means ‘I cannot ride a bicycle’, the answer to this translation riddle is [moth asaikh Wl] ‘motorcycle’. The Koreanized pronunciation of the English word motor [mo th a] is homophonous to the Korean phrase ‘(I) cannot ride’ (mos ta ‘NEG ride’), and since cycle is recognizable as an English loanword, motorcycle is seen as having all the semantic components of ‘I cannot ride a (bi)cycle’.

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Similarly, in example (10), which asks for a Korean translation of an English expression, a literal word-by-word translation of the English phrase how do you do produces a sentence that is recognizable as a common complaint. (10)

Q: “How do you do” ga museun tteusige? ‘How do you say “How do you do” in Korean?’ (lit. ‘What does “how do you do” mean?’) A: “eotteohge nega geuleol su issni?” ‘ “How could you do this (to me)?” ’ cf. eotteohge ne-ga geuleo-l su iss-ni how 2SG-SUB do:so-ATTR way exist-IR ‘ “How could you do this (to me)?” ’ (lit. ‘How do you do so?’)

3.2. Jokes These are formulaic jokes, or Sherzer’s (2002) narrative jokes, which consist of a short narrative ending with a punchline. In Korean-English yumeo, the punchline often has to do with a misuse or misunderstanding of English by the target of the joke. In (11), the target of the joke is Choi Bulam, a famous Korean television actor, who is well known for the quiet and solemn fatherly figures he often portrays, but who has also become the butt of many jokes, perhaps precisely because of the incongruence his serious image produces with the humor. Here, the punchline involves misrecognizing the grapheme in ‘danger’ as representing [a] instead of [ei], and as representing [k] instead of [Ã], which results in a Korean phrase with a quite different meaning. (11)

hwahagsilheomsileseo ilhadeon choe bulami eoneunal byeonsachelo balgyeon doeeossda. “Danger” lago sseuyeoissneun yakpumeul “dangeo” injul algo masin geosida. ‘Choi Bulam was working in a chemistry lab. One day he was found dead in the lab. It turns out he drank some chemicals labeled “Danger”, thinking it meant “sweet stuff”.’ cf. [tan kø] da-n geo sweet-ATTR thing ‘sweet stuff’

In (12), Mandeuk’s uttering of the word [ph ing2] (the Koreanized pronunciation of the English word finger) accompanied by his gesture seems to be a display

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of his knowledge of the English word. However, the punchline reveals that he actually misunderstood [ph ing2] as a Korean phrase meaning ‘straightened one’. (12)

yeongeo sigan, mandeukiga sueopeneun jipjunghaji anhgo jangnanman chija, bodamoshan seonsaengnimi “mandeukiga haljul aneun yeongeoleul hae bodolok!”ilago malsseumhasyeossda. geuleoja mandeukineun songalakeul pimyeo jasinissge malhaessda. “pingeo!” mandeukiga maleul machija, aideuleun “wa!”lago hamseongeul jilleossda. gibuni eusseukhaejin mandeuki, ibeoneneun songalakeul omeulimyeo ileohge malhaneun geosieossda. “omeulingeo!” ‘During English class, Mandeug was not paying attention. The teacher became angry and said to him, “Say any English you can!” Mandeug stood up, full of confidence, showed one of his fingers and said, “[ph ing2]!” As soon as he was finished, all of the students exclaimed, “wow!”. Highly elated by their reaction, Mandeug bent his finger and proudly said, “[omuling2]!”’ gø] [omulin gø] cf. [ph in pi-n geo omeuli-n geo straighten-ATTR thing bend-ATTR thing ‘straightened one’ ‘bent one’

3.3. Humorous experiences These are humorous narratives that are framed as first-hand or second-hand accounts of actual events, and typically involve mishaps in using English. Narratives of humorous experience appear to be a unique genre that is emerging on the Internet. In principle, accounts of humorous experiences are not different from jokes, in that they both consist of a narrative with something of a punchline that serves as a conclusion with humorous effect. For instance, example (13), found on an Internet bulletin board, primarily meets the description of a joke (a short narrative with a punchline), except that the detailed description of the situation is designed to give the joke an impression that it is an account of a real event. Since there is no way to tell whether the event being told actually occurred or not, the distinction between this type of yumeo and a joke in this case appears to be simply a matter of style. (13)

gapiga yeongeo hagwone daninji eolma an doel ddae ipnida. yeongeo hagwon gangsaga gapihante jilmuneul haessjyo. “How are you?” gapiga daedaphaessseupnida. “Yes.” sungan, gangsawa jubyeone daleun salamdeuleun i uioeui sataee ginjanghaessjyo. hajiman neomu

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chakhan gangsaneun gapiga jalmos deuleunjul algo dasi jilmun haessseupnida. “How are you?” (yeojeonhi) “Yes.” gangsaneun i nangwaneul eotteohge cheolihaeya hal jul mollassgo yeopui salameun gogaeleul chyeobakgo useumeul chamgi bappassjyo. geujeseoya jeongsini deun gapi, “a, ige aniji.” gangsaneun dasi cheoncheonhi muleossseupnida. “How are you?” (jasinissge) “No!” ‘A few days after G started studying at an English language school, the teacher asked G in English, “How are you?” G answered, “Yes.” The teacher and all other students suddenly grew nervous because of the unexpected incident. But kindly enough, the teacher asked again, “How are you?” thinking G must have misunderstood. G persisted, “Yes.” The teacher was at a loss, not knowing what to do, and the other students were having a hard time trying not to laugh. Then, G realized, “Oh, wait, this is not right.” When the teacher asked again slowly, “How are you?” G answered confidently, “No!”’ However, such attention to detail is not trivial. Because the way jokes on the Internet are retold and the way spoken/performed jokes are retold are fundamentally different – jokes on Internet yumeo boards are rarely rewritten when they are circulated, but are copied and reposted in its original text, while spoken jokes evolve considerably based on the teller’s performance – jokes on the Internet seem to deliberately include elaborate depictions of (real or fictional) experience to the extent that such depictions are perceived to be a unique characteristic of Internet-based yumeo. Tellings of humorous experiences on the Internet typically take the form of lengthy narratives, with detailed descriptions of the situation or what the characters are thinking, rather than adhering to the concise structure of conventional jokes. In addition, various features are used frequently in this type of yumeo that give the feeling of verbal interaction and also aid in the humorous effect, as we can see in example (14), again taken from the Internet. (14)

oegukingwaui cheosdaehwa seonggong! eoje alba kkeutnago jipe olyeogo beoseuleul tassda. nae apjalie oegukin yeojaga anja isseossneunde, gabangeul mego isseossda. gabang yeopjumeonieneun multongi deuleoisseossneunde, beoseuga gyesok heundeullyeoseo multongi jogeumssik gabang bakkeulo naogo issneun geosieossda. geulaeseo naneun “multongi tteoleojimyeon geu yeojaga dwidolabogessji. geuleomyeon juwoyaji”hago saenggakhaessda. geuleomyeon . . . oegukin: thank you. na: you’re welcome.

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Playing with English: Language ideologies in Korean-English yumeo

sokeulo hueisseul modeun sanghwangeul yecheukhago oegukingwaeui cheos daehwaleul seonggongjeokeulo machigi wihae wanbyeokhan junbileul hago isseossda. geuligo machimnae multongi nae apeulo tteoleojyeossda. geunde yesangchi moshan sanghwangi saenggyeossda. eogukineun ieoponeul kkigo isseoseo multongi ddeoleojineun solileul mos deuleun geosieossda. geulaedo naneun ginjanghaji anhgo jamsi saenggakhan hu multongeul juwoseo geu oegukineui eokkaeleul dudeulimyeo (eotteohge malhaeya halji mollaseo geunyang eokkaeleul dudeulyeossda) multongeul geonnejueossda. geuleoja oegukin: < gomapseupnida. ^ ^> < - - gwalho bubuneul mauseulo seuk . . . na: < ne . . . - -;; > < - - gwalho bubuneul mauseulo seuk . . . ‘I succeeded in my first conversation with a foreigner! Yesterday, I was coming home from my part-time job, riding a bus. A foreign woman was sitting in front of me, and she had a bag on her shoulder. There was a water bottle in the bag, and I saw that the bottle was going to fall out of the bag, because the bus was shaking. So I thought, “If the bottle falls, the woman will turn around, and I’ll pick it up for her. And then (things would go like this). . . ” Foreigner: Thank you.. ^ ^ Me: You’re welcome. ^ ^ I was preparing for my first conversation with a foreigner, imagining every possible situation. Then, finally the bottle fell in front of me. However, an unexpected situation happened. The foreigner had her headphones on, so she couldn’t hear the sound of the bottle falling. But I tried not to be nervous. I pondered for a second and picked up the bottle and tapped on the foreigner’s shoulder (because I didn’t know what to say) and handed her the bottle. Then . . . Foreigner: < Thank you .. ^ ^>

). Edited “audience laughter” or laugh track is marked with L: for short, quiet laughter, for longer, louder laughter. 9. For the same reason, neither does this appear to be an intentional reminder that not all “Americans” are speakers of mainstream American English. 10. In the following examples, subtitles that accompany a line are shown in curly brackets ({ }) and placed next to that line, with their corresponding translation underneath them. 11. This is in contrast with example (21). In (21), the English spoken by the foreigner is not subtitled, but the reason for this is different from why the English in (22) and (23) is not subtitled. In (21), the foreigner’s English is not subtitled because what he is saying here is not relevant to the main point of the scene; that is, the viewers only need to notice that he is speaking in English, and do not need to know what he is

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saying. This is evidenced by the fact that subtitles begin to accompany his lines later in the episode when the content of his speech becomes relevant to the storyline. 12. The structure of this example is identical to the widely circulated joke about the meeting between Japanese prime minister Yoshiro Mori and United States president Bill Clinton (When Mori forgets the phrase his assistant taught him and says “who are you?”, Clinton wittily answers, “I’m Hillary’s husband.” Mori then says “me, too!”). I presume the writers of the show adapted this segment from this joke, which has also been circulated on the Internet in Korean translation. 13. All personal names in the examples of this chapter are pseudonyms. Examples are transcribed using the system described in Du Bois et al. (1992, 1993); see appendix A for details. 14. Since ideologies are multiple, we might also conjecture that different social groups who, due to their different material surroundings, attribute different ideological values to these languages would employ different interactional practices than the ones we have observed.

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Subject index 6th National Curricula, 40 7th National Curricula, 40 agency, 11, 12, 168, 220, 231, 239 anxiety, 3, 227 class, 46, 48 infiltration of English, 54 securing English as a national resource, 58 speaking English, 113–114, 129 applied linguistics, 12, 235, 236, 240 Arirang TV, 32 Asian Financial Crisis, 57–58, 81 assessment (of language skills), 50, 235 assessment (social action), 177, 184 authorization, 75, 165 autonomous private schools (jaliphyeong salip godeunghakgyo), 45 Center for Free Enterprise, 66, 67 Cheongshim International Academy, 45 Chosun Ilbo, 65–69, 72, 89–90 class, 45, 49–52 colonialism, 5, 8, 226. See also Japanese colonial rule commodificaiton of language, 228 communication value (Q-value), 16 communicative language teaching, 82, 236–238 competence discursive construction of, 35–36, 49–51, 227–232. See also self-deprecation concession, 85, 86 conservative press, 50, 67, 70–71, 76 conversation analysis, 169–170, 174–176 cross-linguistic humor, 96–99 Daewoo, 42 danil minjok (unified people), 30

diasporic Chinese (hwagyo), 29 disclaiming English, 211–212, 217–221 Donga Ilbo, 72 encountering a foreigner, 76, 111, 224 English in Korean advertisements, 31 in Korean education system, 34, 39–41 in Korean newspapers, 31, in Korean pop music, 31 in Korean universities, 42 in Korean workplace, 43 hegemony of, 2, 4, 7–8, 11–12, 16–18 ownership of, 7, 52, 113, 163, 212, 226, 228–229 unspeakableness of, 2–3, 229–232 English frenzy (yeongeo yeolpung), 1–3, 49, 230 English immersion classes, 39–41, 67 English-only kindergartens (yeongeo yuchiwon), 44, 138, 191 English village, 3, 46–49, 237 authenticity of, 47 eohak yeonsu (English study abroad), 44 equalization, 45 erasure, 36, 83 essentialization, 77 ethnography, 12, 233 externalization, 26, 77–80, 86, 91, 113–114, 119, 125, 127, 163, 212, 226 Federation of Korean Industries, 66 framing, 139, 177 geolinguistics, 10 global hip hop, 9 globalization, 2, 15 homogeneity vs. heterogeneity, 239–240

270

Subject index

language and the global economy, 18, 226, 228–229 segyehwa, 39 grammar-translation method, 82, 236 Gukeo Munhwa Undong Bonbu, 54, 69 Gukjeeo Sidaeui Minjokeo, 61–65 gukjein (international), 43 habitus, 27, 231 hakseupji (worksheet), 44 Hangeul Munhwa Yeondae, 54, 69 Herald Media, 32, 46 Hong Kong, 10, 76, 227 humor romanticization of, 97–98 hyper-Koreanization, 148 Hyundai, 67 identity discursive construction of, 14–15 ideology pooling, 84 illegitimation, 80, 92, 127–128, 164, 221, 227 imagined community, 30, 134–135, 165 impact captioning, 160 incompetence. See competence, self-deprecation incompetence and humor, 112 India, 10, 19 injae (human talent), 43 institutions (of power), 17, 134–137, 169, 172–173 interactional practices, 174 interdiscursivity, 22 international marriage, 29 International Monetary Fund, 57 Internet, 62, 100, 104 interpretive resource, 139, 163–165 investment, 236 jaebeol, 42, 57, 59, 66, 67, 68 Japan, 33, 58, 62, 66, 73, 227 Japanese (language), 210–211 Japanese colonial rule, 52–53, 79–80

jogi yuhak (early overseas education), 3, 44–46, 52, 237 Joseoneo Hakhoe incident, 52–53 Konglish, 109, 122 Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, 42 Korea Herald, 32 Korea Times, 32 Korea University, 42 Korea Writers Association, 66 Korean Chungcheong dialect, 117 Englishization of, 19, 34 Jeonla dialect, 29, 118 Korean-English bilingualism, 34–36, 71 standard, 29 Korean Minjok Leadership Academy, 45 language attitudes, 13, 21 language endangerment, 8 language ideology, 3–4, 13–15 contestable vs. uncontestable, 91 in the media, 135–136 language ideological debates, 59 language ideology as interpretive filter, 4, 13–14, 21 multisitedness and site-specificness, 22 language policy and planning, 11 laugh track, 136, 142–143, 148 legitimation, 26 linguistic anthropology, 13, 22, 23, 136, 174, 240 linguistic capital, 43, 80 linguistic ecology, 7–8 linguistic human rights, 7–8 linguistic imperialism, 7–8 linguistic insecurity, 227 linguistic market, 17–18, 226 linguistic nationalism, 52–53 linguistic purism, 20, 53–55 linguistics, 10

Subject index local imagination of the global, 94, 224, 239 macro vs. micro, 11, 240 Malaysia, 10 metalinguistic discourse, 21 metalinguistic practices, 23, 129, 166 migrant workers, 29 minjokjuui (nationalism), 62, 68 monolingualism, 20, 136, 227 in Korea, 29–30, 36 native speaker, 6, 44, 46–48, 143–144, 161, 218, 226, 228 necessitation, 26, 74–77, 85, 91, 113, 124, 163, 212, 226, neoliberalism, 62, 84 performativity, 9 Philippines, the, 10 pluricentrism, 6–7 positionality of the researcher, 24–25 preference, 175 pretentiousness, 119, 122, 220 private English institutes, 44 public vs. private, 165 repair, 183 sadaejuui (toadyism), 70, 77, 79 Sangsang Plus, 54 schema, 110 self-deprecation, 26, 80–83, 87, 91, 114, 119, 125, 163, 212, 224–226 Seoul National University, 68 simultaneity, 125–127, 139, 163, 220

271

Singapore, 10, 58, 76, 227 site, 12, 22 interconnectedness of, 12, 130–132, 166–167 metapragmatic constraints, 22, 27, 130–132, 173, 224 situation comedy (sitcom), 137–138 sociolinguistics, 6, 12, 14, 174, 240 sociology of language, 10 special economic zones, 39, 66 special high schools (teuksu mokjeok godeunghakgyo), 45 subtitles, 136, 149–154, 159–161, 225 symbolic domination, 17 Taiwan, 58, 227 TEPS, 68 TOEFL, 42, 107 TOEIC, 42, 49, 68, 107 tongue surgery, 1, 3, 52 tongyeok jeongbu (translation government), 37 transcription, 149 Ulimal Gyeolugi, 54 unintended consequences, 98, 220 United States, 18, 37, 44 variety shows, 138 World Englishes, 6, 10, 19 YBM Education, 46 yeongeo jogi gyoyuk (Early English education), 40 yeongeo yeolpung. See English frenzy

Name index Abelmann, Nancy, 44, 45 Agha, Asif, 22 Ahn, Joo-Hoh, 32 Anderson, Benedict, 14, 29, 134 Appadurai, Arjun, 94, 239 Ashcroft, Bill, 226 Baik, Martin Jonghak, 19, 34–35, 38–39 Bak, Byeongsu, 78 Besnier, Niko, 12, 240 Block, David, 240 Blommaert, Jan, 8, 59 Bok, Geoil, 61–65, 75, 81 Bolton, Kingsley, 10 Bourdieu, Pierre, 18, 20, 27, 45, 50, 98, 221, 226 Briggs, Charles, 21 Brown, Penelope, 122, 179 Brutt-Griffler, Janina, 8, 229 Bucholtz, Mary, 14, 26, 75, 77, 80, 90, 149, 174, 217 Butler, Yuko Goto, 236 Cameron, Deborah, 18, 228, 232, 240 Canagarajah, A. Suresh, 7, 8, 12, 229, 238 Cho, Dong-Il, 71, 92 Choe, Hyeonbae, 53 Choe, Wonsik, 70 Choi, Soyoung Ahn, 43 Collins, James, 240 Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth, 85 Coupland, Nikolas, 240 Cummins, Jim, 11 Crystal, David, 5–7, 91 Davies, Christie, 112, 114 de Swann, Abram, 10, 16 Dorian, Nancy, 227 Drew, Paul, 172 Eagleton, Terry, 23

Eckert, Penelope, 14, 175, 176 Edwards, John V., 35 Ellis, Elizabeth, 36 Erickson, Frederick, 169 Errington, Joseph, 23 Fishman, Joshua A., 10–11 Foucault, Michel, 17 Freeland, Jane, 8 Funabashi, Youichi, 58 Gal, Susan, 3, 26, 36, 83, 134, 137, 165 Giddens, Anthony, 98, 169, 220, 233 Giles, Howard, 17 Go, Gilseop, 29, 37, 53, 117 Go, Jongseok, 71 Goffman, Erving, 139, 175, 177, 217 Goldstein, Tara, 217 Goodwin, Charles, 174 Gramsci, Antonio, 17 Guill´en, Mauro F., 15, 240 Gumperz, John J., 169 Hahm, Jae-Bong, 71, 86 Hall, Kira, 12, 14, 26, 75, 77, 80, 90, 217, 240 Hall, Stuart, 94 Han, Hakseong, 65, 66, 67, 70, 71, 73, 82, 87 Han, Yeongu, 70 Heller, Monica, 12, 18, 126, 142, 169, 220, 228, 233, 240 Heo, Mangil, 53, 54 Heritage, John, 172 Hill, Jane H., 8, 23, 97, 98, 130, 148, 165 Hornberger, Nancy, 11, 12 Irvine, Judith, 14, 18, 23, 26, 36, 83, 175 Jaworski, Adam, 3 Jin, Junggweon, 70 Jung, Bora, 43

Name index Jung, Gwari, 71, 86 Jung, Kyutae, 31 Jung, Sook Kyung, 40, 236, 238 Jung, Un-Yeong, 62 Kachru, Braj, 6, 10, 234 Kim, Dae Jung, 68 Kim, Kyung Il, 71 Kim, Sejung, 70 Kim, Yeongmyeong, 69, 70, 78, 85 Kitzinger, Celia, 170 Kroskrity, Paul V., 3, 13 Kwon, Oryang, 40 Labov, William, 227 Lee, Jamie Shinhee, 31, 33 Lee, Jiyoon, 40 Lee, Ju-haeng, 31 Lee, Kyung-sook, 40 Lee, Myung-bak, 40, 66, 76 Lerner, Gene H., 175 Levinson, Stephen C., 122, 179 Li, Defeng, 236, 237 Lim, Gyu-hong, 31 Lim, Lisa, 10 Lin, Angel M. Y., 12 Lippi-Green, Rosina, 227 Liu, Dilin, 236, 238 Macaulay, Ronald K. S., 234 McElhinny, Bonnie, 134, 165, 168 McKay, Sandra Lee, 237 McTague, Mark John, 43 Mertz, Elizabeth, 4 Moon, Hyun-hee, 32, 35 Moon, Katharine H. S., 29 M¨uhlh¨ausler, Peter, 7 Nam, Yeongsin, 69, 89 Norton, Bonny, 40, 229, 236, 238 Ochs, Elinor, 149, 175 Pakir, Anne, 12

273

Park, Chung-Hee, 54 Park, Hyeson, 43 Park, Joseph Sung-Yul, 9, 33, 83, 160, 163, 190, 221 Park, Kangmoon, 70, 78, 79 Park, Nahm-Sheik, 55 Park, So Jin, 44, 45 Patrick, Donna, 8 Pennycook, Alastair, 4, 6, 8, 9, 17, 64, 235 Philips, Susan U., 22, 83, 130 Phillipson, Robert, 6, 7, 16, 17, 229, 238 Pomerantz, Anita, 174, 175, 179, 181, 184, 185 Pool, Jonathan, 84 Pratt, Mary Louise, 126 Preston, Dennis R., 149 Ramanathan, Vaidehi, 8, 12 Reay, Diane, 221 Rhee, Syngman, 37 Ricento, Thomas, 11, 84 Robertson, Roland, 91 Romaine, Suzanne, 227 Sacks, Harvey, 174 Samimy, Keiko K., 229 Schegloff, Emanuel A., 169, 174, 177, 183 Schieffelin, Bambi, 3 Schmid, Carol L., 11 Sherzer, Joel, 102, 103, 121 Shim, Rosa Jinyoung, 19, 34–35, 38–39 Shin, Gi-Wook, 68 Shin, Hyunjung, 8, 40, 41, 47, 237, 238 Shohamy, Elana, 11 Shultz, Jeffrey, 169 Siegel, Jeff, 97 Silverstein, Michael, 3, 4, 13, 14, 21, 22, 59, 94, 227, 234 Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove, 7, 11 Slembrouck, Stef, 240 Song, Jae Jung, 19, 35, 38 Sonntag, Selma K., 84 Speer, Susan A., 170

274

Name index

Spitulnik, Debra, 134, 136 Stroud, Christopher, 59 Talib, Ismail S., 226 Tannen, Deborah, 89, 139, 177 Thompson, Sandra A., 85 Tollefson, James W., 11 Tsitsipis, Lukas, D., 26

Widdowson, Henry G., 229 Willis, Paul, 98 Woolard, Kathryn A., 3, 13, 21, 23, 97, 125, 134, 137, 165, 220 Wortham, Stanton E. F., 22

Urban, Greg, 22, 59, 94 Urla, Jacqueline, 135, 136

Yi, Min-Hong, 70 Yi, Yungi, 78 Yim, So-Young, 32 Yoo, Ok Kyoon, 60, 65, 72

Wee, Lionel, 9, 22, 33

Zentella, Ana Celia, 227