“Multilingual islands in the monolingual sea”: Foreign languages in the South Korean linguistic landscape

Abstract

The article aims at analyzing data on the South Korean linguistic landscape, with a focus on multilingual practices and different dimensions of language use, sets of norms, and ideological constructs underling particular linguistic choices. It is based on the analysis of a data set of over 800 digital photos of various signs and advertisements as well as necessary metadata gathered in 2018–2020 in four different urban contexts. The data, on the one hand, reflect recent changes favoring multilingualism; on the other hand, they demonstrate pragmatic inequality of other languages than Korean in public use. This inequality, however, is represented differently in certain spatial urban contexts; while commodified English tends to function as a substitution for other foreign languages and as an emblem of “foreignness,” agentivity of new ethnically diverse speakers creates “multilingual islands,” and that process can at some point challenge the dominance of monolingual ideology.

Emerging Multilingual Children’s School Language Socialization: A Three-Year Longitudinal Case Study of a Korean Middle School

“…The conventional perception of South Korea has been predominantly monolingual and monocultural, as documented by early scholars (e.g., Spolsky 1972). However, the forces of globalization and a notable surge in migration to South Korea have engendered a shifting sociodemographic landscape not only in schools but also in Korean society at large (Fedorova and Nam 2023; Korean Ministry of Justice 2022). Notably, among the migrants, the number of Russian-speaking migrants reflects a substantial presence as one of the top five foreign-origin resident groups in Korea, hailing from various regions, including Russia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan (Korean Ministry of Justice 2022), and they are the focal participants in this article.…”