‘I want to learn Seoul speech!’: language ideologies and practices among rural marriage-migrants in South Korea

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how Southeast Asian marriage-migrant women in South Korea and their Korean language teachers view regional Korean dialects versus standard Korean. It also investigates in what ways these language ideologies impact the migrant women’s language practices. The data were collected through ethnographic observation and semi-structured interviews with four marriage-migrants and their language teachers. The findings suggest that the migrants’ use of the non-standard Korean dialect they initially acquired on arrival in Korea has contributed to their linguistic marginalization, particularly in the workplace. A consequent sense of inferiority about the way they speak Korean in turn creates barriers to the formation of pluralistic language ideologies. The women considered standard Korean a symbol of prestige and linguistic capital necessary to achieve membership in mainstream Korean society. For this reason, they actively invested in mastering standard Korean, which, for most, meant abandoning their regional Korean dialect. The paper concludes that the host society’s awareness of the importance of linguistic and cultural diversity is crucial in addressing marriage-migrants’ marginalization. It also suggests that including more bidialectal teachers in marriage-migrants’ language classrooms could have a positive impact on their language learning by helping them use both regional Korean dialects and standard Korean appropriately.

KEYWORDS:

• Language ideology
• language use
• standard language
• regional dialect
• marriage-migrant
• Korean

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Mi Yung Park is a lecturer in Asian Studies, School of Cultures, Languages and Linguistics, University of Auckland, New Zealand. Her research interests include language and identity, multilingualism, and social interaction. She has published her work in Classroom Discourse, Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Journal of Pragmatics, Language and Intercultural Communication, and The Korean Language in America.

Notes

1 Urban areas other than the main metropolitan centers of Seoul, Incheon, Busan, Daegu, Daejeon, Gwangju, and Ulsan are considered rural. Those in North Gyeongsang have populations between 10,000 and 500,000. As of 8 May 2017, the population of the city that the participants reside in was 101,487; their towns (i.e. adminstrative units within the city) had populations between 2166 and 12,507 (Sangju City 2017).

2 While these women might face linguistic challenges with their families and other dialect users, these challenges are not related to their use of a dialect vis-à-vis standard Korean, but rather other issues, such as the use of honorific forms.

3 I thank Alec Redvers-Hill for pointing this out.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by an Arts Faculty Research Development Fund, University of Auckland and by an Academy of Korean Studies Grant funded by the Korean Government (MEST) [grant number AKS-2012-BAA-2101].