‘Ehh? Order through kiosk? What’s that?’ Public attitudes towards the excessive Anglicisation of commerce in South Korea

ABSTRACT

This study reports on an analysis of user-generated comments in response to a newspaper article criticising an overwhelmingly Anglicised user interface in self-ordering kiosks in South Korea. A total of 1,206 comments were subjected to qualitative analysis to identify salient themes reflecting the public’s attitudes towards the practice and desirable adjustments. The results showed polarised responses, with ‘strongly nationalistic’ language attitudes at one extreme and rather lenient, albeit not actively supportive, ‘why not?’ attitudes at the other, indicating tension between the ideologies underlying the accommodation or denial of the necessity of English. The coexistence of resistance to the practice (79.7%) and the heated pursuit of English on a national level defies the general scholarly observation that unfavourable views of a language obstruct its vitality in society. The public’s attitude towards the phenomenon of excessive Anglicisation appears to be driven largely by the ideology of externalisation rather than the pervasive neoliberal necessitation authorising English as the lingua franca of the globalising world. Although the contingent nature of language attitudes is indicated, the overall findings suggest a transition in attitudes towards the use of English, from perceiving it as a status symbol to viewing it as an unedifying manifestation of linguistic dandyism.

KEYWORDS:

• Language attitude
• language ideology
• Anglicisation
• globalisation
• Korea

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).