Seo-young Chae

For the past 14 years, Seo-young Chae has been teaching at the Sogang University, a Jesuit university in Seoul, Korea. As a graduate student, she has worked as a part time translator for the NBC News, and worked for the Today Show during the Seoul Olympics, but she has pursued her academic career after receiving the Rotary Scholarship. While doing her Ph. D., she has worked as an adjunct, teaching Korean to Americans and Korean Americans and as a researcher at the Bell Laboratory for the Worldwide Speech Recognition Project. She has taught Linguistics at Ewha University, Hanyang University, and Sungkyunkwan University after returning to Korea.

She is currently working at the Department of English Language and Literature at Sogang, but her specialization is in the field of Socioinguistics which deals with language in its social context. This means that her research covers not only English but also Korean, including their contacts, She is particularly interested in language variation and change and has written articles and book chapters in this area. Her major work is on Korean vowel shift but her recent interests are in languages in contact, calling terms, titles, personal names, pronouns, as well as language planning. She is interested in how Korea's traditional social system is reflected in its language and the language influences Korean people's way of thinking and relationship.

She did her Ph. D at the University of Pennsylvania and was a visiting scholar at the University of Pittsburgh. She is currently involved with the Sociolinguistic Society of Korea, and the Society for English Language Education.

She is a co-autor of the books such as Introduction to English Linguistics, How to Write Messages and Letters (for Korean readers), and Korea's Calling Terms and the Korean Society. She has served as the editor of Sogang Herald, Department Chair, Chair of the Graduate School of Education, and Graduate Chair of the English Linguistics Program at the Sogang University.