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Global flows of migration to South Korea bring a new challenge of how to negotiate the identities of migrants. Unlike other reported cases that reframe the value of migrants’ first language as part of contingent practices of diversity management, the South Korean government has responded to this challenge by explicitly reframing so-called damunhwa mothers (foreign women married to Korean men) as bilingual workers, imagining them as self-governed, autonomous workers whose linguistic capital can be mobilized for the betterment of South Korean society. The government’s adoption of linguistic entrepreneurship and ethnocentric nationalism becomes particularly salient in this process. This paper studies how four damunhwa mothers respond to this new bilingual worker identity as promoted in the bilingual policy texts. We examine the ways in which they negotiate their bilingual worker identities by echoing the government’s new linguistic nationalism and linguistic entrepreneurship on the one hand, and by problematizing the insecure job markets, stratified linguistic needs, lack of systematic training for bilingual instructors, and native Korean’s misunderstanding of their new roles on the other. Finally, we discuss the implications of Korea’s bilingual policy, elaborating on the significance of linguistic entrepreneurship in language policy planning and practice and calling for more reflective accounts of ecological and translingual policy implementation in Korea.

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