The Korean English Linguistic Landscape
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World Englishes, Vol. 31, No. 1, pp. 70–92, 2012. 0883-2919 The Korean English linguistic landscape C. BRUCE LAWRENCE∗ ABSTRACT: This paper utilizes sociolinguistic theories of social stratification, gravity and cascade models to analyze the usage of English in the linguistic landscape of Korea. Public signs in different regions of Seoul and Korea were photographed and analyzed according to the percentage of English, Korean, Konglish, and Chinese. Labov’s gravity model was not found to be accurate, but his social stratification and cascade models were moderately supported. However, in all regions of Seoul and greater Korea, there are domains of English. English is found in the physical domains of main streets, amusement parks and foreign districts, in the product domains of beer, wine and clothing, and in the sociolinguistic domains of modernity, luxury and youth. INTRODUCTION The spread of English in Korea English has become the lingua franca of the world, so that, today, many people in the European Union, for example, use English to communicate with neighboring countries. The economic and cultural influence of the United States has lead to the increased use of English around the world and it is now the main language of international communication. English vocabulary items such as ‘taxi’, ‘visa’ and ‘exchange’ are used throughout the globe the tourism domain, and other English words are being borrowed into specific languages for specific purposes, such as ‘high hat’ (someone who puts on airs, a snob) in the Philippines (Platt, Weber, and Ho 1984), and ‘hand phone’ (cellular phone) in Japan and Korea (Lawrence 2010). However, the numbers that support this are confusing. English is not the language with the largest number of ‘native speakers’ (i.e. speakers of English in Inner Circle countries; see below). The Summer Institute for Linguistics (SIL) Ethnologue Survey (Gordon 2005), lists the top three languages by native speakers as Chinese, English and Hindi/Urdu. English is the most common language designated a ‘second language’, and Crystal (2003) lists 75 nations in which English ‘holds a special place’ with numerous L1 (first language) and L2 (second language) speakers. He calculates that there are around 98 million speakers of English as a second language, but estimates that number to be around 350 million if you include ESL immigrant populations living in English-speaking countries, adding that if you allow for those with a limited ability in English the number would soar to 1,500 million (Crystal 1995; 1997). Gargesh (2006) notes that English is also the preferred ‘language of the educated elite’ in many countries. Kachru (1985) suggests dividing the English-speaking world into three concentric circles. The first ‘Inner Circle’ includes countries such as the USA and the UK where English is used as a first language. The second ‘Outer Circle’ includes the countries where English is spoken as a second or ∗Ajou University, Dept. of Humanities, San 5, Woncheon-dong, Yeongton-gu, Suwon 443–749, S. Korea, (PhD candidate Seoul National University [SNU]). E-mail: [email protected] C 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd The Korean English linguistic landscape 71 Figure 1. Korean education spending (Kim 2008) significant language such as India and Singapore. The third ‘Expanding Circle’ refers to countries where English has acquired cultural or commercial importance, such as China and Russia. Recent estimates include Crystal’s (2003) estimation of the Outer Circle as being 300–500 million and Crystal’s (2010: 37) estimate of ‘First language speakers of English’ (369,706,100) and the population of ‘countries where English has special status as a medium of communication, including those where people learn it, usually in school, as a second language’ (2,902,853,000). The fever for English is by no means foreign to Korea, and Koreans now study English from elementary school all the way through university, although the Korea National Statistics Office estimates that school fees only cover about 24 per cent of English education costs. Today, Korean parents spend millions of won and thousands of dollars on extra-curricular English classes at language institutes or hagwons,covering 73 per cent of domestic English education costs, and an increasing amount of Korean parents are sending their children abroad to study English (see Figure 1). However, the nation of Korea and the city of Seoul actually have a rather tenuous rela- tionship with English. While some policy makers feel that Korea needs to adopt English as an official language, others have argued that this would bring about the decline of the Korean language and the destruction of national identity. For example, The Seoul Devel- opment Institute (2004) has compared Singapore’s successful attempt to make English an official language with Jeju Island’sfailure to do so. Jeju is an island off the south west coast of Korea, where despite President Roh Moo-hyun’s efforts and the Jeju Provincial Gov- ernment’s interest in making English the ‘second official language’, local people remain resistant to this policy (Korea Herald 2003; Young 2008). The Institute concluded that Singapore succeeded because of ‘cultural flexibility’ and Jeju failed because of feelings of national identity, even though Jeju Island continues to promote English education and use through projects such as ‘The English Education City’ and ‘The Jeju Free International City’ (Young 2008). The Institute suggested that the Seoul City government work on in- creasing the population’s cultural flexibility and familiarity with English and, rather than adopting English as an official language, it should adopt English as a ‘public language’, C 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 72 C. Bruce Lawrence which they define as being ‘more culturally common than official language’ (author’s translation). In addition to Jeju Island, Korea and other Asian countries have mixed attitudes toward English. Some research indicates a positive attitude toward English due to its associations with ‘internationalization’, ‘reliability’, ‘modernity’ and ‘sophistication’ (Haarmann 1984; Takashi 1990; Song 1998). Other research indicates a neutral attitude toward English and its use for ‘new technology terms’, ‘neologisms’ and ‘euphemisms’ (Honna 1995) and it being ‘attitudinally neutral’ (Morrow 1987). Other research shows a negative attitude toward English. Lee (2004) suggests that Korean pop musicians use English as a language of ‘self-assertion’ and ‘resistance’ against older conservative values, while Lee (2006: 237) criticizes K-Pop star BoA for using ‘two languages of the other: the ex-colonizer Japan and the oft-accused unofficial imperialist America’. Collins (2005) argues that English was associated with ‘pro-Japanese conservativism’ and the ‘US military government’ and criticizes Korean pop singer J for not knowing what ‘tong-il (the reunification of North and South Korea)’ is. Baik (1992) argues that many Koreans are involved in the movement for the ‘purification’ of Korean and the use of ‘pure’ Korean words. So ‘English as a Public Language’ has its opponents. Konglish The tenuous relationship between English and Korean has produced an offspring: Konglish. Like its name, it entails a mixture of English and Korean, but defining it is rather difficult. Academic studies have focused on loanwords (Tranter 1997), while (Shim 1999) viewed it as ‘codified Korean English’. However, Konglish is a spoken, not codified, language and its vocabulary has undergone too much transmutation to be simply labeled loanwords. Konglish is mentioned in a number of ESL textbooks (Fisher and Stuart 2006a, 2006b; Holt, Middleton, and Park 2008), and is the subject of a number of internet web- sites (such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konglish; http://efl.htmlplanet.com/konglish. htm;http://www.funtrivia.com/trivia-quiz/Humanities/Konglish-101–203597.html). Konglish is often defined via vocabulary, sometimes via grammar, sometimes via pro- nunciation, and sometimes simply classed as ‘bad English’. Some of the processes involved in Konglish are similar to those of pidginization and creolization. For example, numer- ous scholars have noted the process of ‘simplification’ in the pidginization of languages (Decamp 1971; Hymes 1971; Foley 1997), and Konglish words such as ‘aircon (aircon- ditioner)’, ‘OT (orientation)’ and ‘home p (homepage)’ display similar simplification. Konglish is also similar to what Lightbrown and Spada (2001) define as ‘interlanguage’, which is a learner’s developing second language knowledge that may have characteristics of the learner’sfirst language, characteristics of the second language, and some characteris- tics that occur in most interlanguage systems. However, Konglish is perhaps closest to Platt et al.’s (1984) notion of ‘new Englishes’. They sought to distinguish ‘new Englishes’ from erroneous English or creative, but fleeting, usages of English, and devised the following criteria: 1. It has developed through the education system. 2. It has developed in an area where a native variety of English was not the language spoken by most of the population. C 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd The Korean English linguistic landscape 73 3. It is used for a range of functions among those who speak or write it in the region where it is used. 4. It has become ‘localized’ or ‘nativized’ by adopting some language feature of its own, such as sounds, intonation patterns, sentence structures, words, expressions. (Platt et al. 1984: 2–3) Yet, all of these definitions fall short of delineating precisely what Konglish actually is. It cannot be described as a traditional ‘pidgin’ or ‘creole’ because it the context of its development has been very different from that found in pidgin/creole contexts. It is not a ‘new English’ or an interlanguage, because it is not an identifiable variety as such, but might rather be conceptualized as a sub-variety of Korean, in the form of words and phrases. At the same time, it cannot be considered a series of ‘mistakes’ either, because educated Koreans recognize that ‘director’ is not spelled ‘direkter’ or ‘Yesterday, I have visited to Japan’ should be ‘Yesterday, I visited Japan’.