To the outside world, South Korea is widely regarded as a modern nation with ‘cool’ popular culture, sophisticated cities and widely respected car and technology brands—somewhere Korean authorities say tourists can experience ‘harmony’ between traditional and modern culture.

Rapid change continues in South Korea: its previously strict immigration policies are being opened up to address labour shortages and boost economic growth amid a declining birth rate, and its language is perceived by many as being under attack by the influence of foreign languages such as English and Japanese.

The Korean language is central to national identity and culture and dominant notions about the ‘purity’ of Koreans and Korea, so change brought about by migration and the influence of globalisation goes to the heart of modern Korea.

Ross King is a professor of Korean language and literature at the University of British Columbia, and he spoke with Melbourne Asia Review’s Managing Editor, Cathy Harper.

Can you begin by explaining how the centrality of Korean language to national identity is manifested?

The first thing I would say about Korean linguistic nationalism is that it’s quite strong, although it’s relatively new. It’s only been around for about 100 years—since the turn of the last century. What’s somewhat unique about Korea is that it has a strong linguistic nationalism tied to ethnic identity, both in the North and the South with different twists, but in Korea linguistic nationalism is in effect script nationalism. We have other spectacular cases of linguistic nationalism around the world but very few where it essentially collapses into almost a cult of the native writing system. It’s a script nationalism where the word Hangul, which we normally think of as the word for the indigenous alphabet, often gets conflated with the language. And very little distinction is made between Hangul and 한국말 Hangungmal (the language). Most of the promotional efforts overseas are focused on the language, and there’s a kind of schizophrenic discourse of linguistic nationalism that on the one hand is paranoid and obsessed with promoting its ‘superior excellence’. There’s a word for that in Korean, it’s 우수성 ususŏng, which if you do a Google search it will pull up all kinds of websites tied to the language or to the alphabet. There is this idea of promoting and celebrating the ‘superior excellence’ of ‘our language’ by which they usually mean just the alphabet.

This script nationalism is taught in schools, in the sense that it’s something that is inculcated in the citizenry, starting from elementary school where they learn about the history of their fabulous alphabet, and the brilliant king in the 15th century who invented it (all true). But at the policy level, it’s almost entirely government bodies—whether the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Education and also the special branch of Foreign Affairs that deals with overseas Korean ethnic communities. It’s a discourse that pervades everything when you start talking about language and especially about promoting the language overseas to foreigners, which is a very recent and unprecedented development. Historically speaking, people outside of Korea have never had any real interest in learning Korean for the last 2,000 years. It’s only in the last 20-25 years that other people have been interested (putting aside the Japanese police force during the colonial period). Korean policy makers and government organisations are still figuring out how to react to that in a policy way and they’re being pretty clumsy about it.

The pervasiveness that you speak of .. would you say that the ordinary South Korean person would adhere to this sort of message of the ‘superior excellence’ of Hangul?

It’s unquestioned, it’s assumed. It’s also very racialised and ethnicised in the sense that modern Korean nationalism in general has been very racialised and the vocabulary around it is somewhat fascist. For example, the word that they used for a people or a race is 민족 minjok which is from Japanese, which is from German Volk. A lot of it is downloaded from Japanese militarism and fascism, because Korea was under the Japanese control for 35 years in a formative period where they didn’t really have a chance to learn their language in schools except for a privileged few. They weren’t allowed to undertake the kinds of cultivation and codification projects that other modernised countries did with their languages. There’s a kind of collective chip on Korean shoulders about this missed opportunity in the first half of the 20th century and the oppression that they suffered under the Japanese. It is racialised in the sense that Koreans, for a long time in modern Korea, were taught that ‘we are one people with one bloodline, one language’. And, you know, the corollary to that is that ‘if you’re a foreigner, there’s no way you can learn the language’, which I believe, in a way, infects and affects the way Koreans promote their language overseas, which is essentially packaged in a kind of dumbed down version with the assumption that ‘a foreigner can never really learn our language because they just don’t have Korean genes’.

Is that not a little self-defeating?

They don’t see that, because most of the people doing it are ethnic Koreans—99 percent of the colleagues out there who teach Korean language are ethnic Koreans, born and raised and educated in Korea who’ve already ‘drunk the Kool-Aid’ around a lot of this discourse and whether they know it or not, deep down, that’s kind of the way they feel about it. So, when they teach the language, they don’t have the same expectations of a foreign learner that they would of someone who’s ethnically Korean. I see this all the time as one of the very few ethnically non-Koreans who is in the business of teaching Korean.

May I ask at this point whether you’re mainly talking about the South Korean context?

Anything you can say about the South more or less applies in the North with different shadings. Sometimes it applies in the North on steroids because there’s only one official ideology. You don’t have multiple competing NGOs or other non-government voices—it’s just the government. Of course, North Korea is not involved, at least not anymore, in trying to promote Korean language and culture overseas. They were for a little while when the Soviet Union was still around and they would occasionally do things in the Soviet Union, but it was very weak and ineffective.

I imagine from what you’ve said that in modern South Korea there’s a narrative of the people themselves being culturally and linguistically homogenous?

Yes, but it’s becoming increasingly diluted. That was standard fare up through the 1980s, until 1987 when there was democratisation. But it’s still deeply ingrained and hard to shake because most of the people in positions of power and influence are in their 60s, 70s and 80s and that’s the way they were brought up.

There have been a lot of influences on Korea, both within and outside it, recently and in its history. Could you try to give an overview of some of the most important influences on what have now become part of what’s widely perceived to be ‘Korean’?

There are basically three major influences. The first is Chinese, but Koreans never really learned how to speak Chinese—they were never interested in learning spoken Chinese. They learned written, Literary Sinitic (‘classical Chinese’) and only the very elite did that. Even today, I would say, anywhere from 60-75 percent of the lexicon is sinographic vocabulary—words that could be, and used to be, written in sinographs, in Chinese characters. There’s been a big debate running for decades as to whether or not Koreans should still learn those characters in school. Because of the link to the script nationalism that I’ve described to you, mostly it has fallen by the wayside and they don’t learn Chinese characters in school anymore in Korea. By doing that, they have sort of fooled themselves into thinking that their language no longer has this huge Sinitic component to it, but it does. The words don’t go away, they just don’t write them with the characters anymore. The irony is that in North Korea, where they stopped using Chinese characters completely in the public sphere from the late 1940s, they have nonetheless consistently taught them in schools. South Korea has sort of waffled back and forth and now is increasingly not teaching them. The reason they’re still teaching them in North Korean schools is because they realise that if you want to be better at speaking Korean, whether you’re a Korean or not, you need to study them. So, Chinese is a huge influence in terms of vocabulary especially, but other ways too because it’s a whole package whereby for two millennia the one reference culture Koreans had was Sinitic/Chinese culture, along with Buddhism and Confucianism. Anything that had to do with Sinitic culture writ large influences Korea hugely. Modern-day nationalism forces them to be embarrassed about that, although for those 2,000 years they weren’t in the least embarrassed about it, but were actually quite proud of it because they were very good at it.

The next one is Japanese. Huge chunks of the modern intellectual vocabulary (any of the vocabulary you need to read an academic article in Korean, for example) is sinographically derived, but via Japan—they’re Japanese neologisms. So the word I just mentioned, the word for race or for nation, 민족 minjok is actually a Japanese word (minzoku) and the word for classical Chinese, which in Korean is 한문 hanmun, is Japanese kanbun, a Japanese word and a usage that came through Japan. There are hundreds of these and because all of the educated Koreans in the colonial period studied in Japan and spoke Japanese, there’s been a huge influence on the language in terms of even literary style. Scratch the surface and it’s really Japanese. This is something that experts know, but that if you say to the average person on the street, they’ll get offended.

After 1945, it’s all about American English. Of course, there are different purism movements reacting to it in the North and the South. Right now, English is running rampant in South Korea, and all the intellectuals learn English and go abroad to the USA, Australia or to the United Kingdom to study. It influences the Korean language itself. As an intellectual, the mark of being an intellectual is you pepper your Korean with English words, often in Korean phonological guise. There are also huge numbers of loan words, especially in young people’s language.

There are still people who complain about Japanese influences, but they tend to be really right-wing older people. It’s not really about Japanese anymore—it’s 100 percent about English. It’s not just about the language, but also about when and how it should be taught in schools and the fact that it’s becoming a kind of gatekeeping mechanism for the rich and powerful. Those who can afford it send their children abroad at a very young age to learn English. There’s a huge sub-industry in academia studying the so-called ‘wild goose’ fathers, who send their wife and kids to an English-speaking country. If they have the money, it’s the United States; if they don’t have as much money, it’s the Philippines. They basically never see their family because they’re just earning the money and then sending the money to their wife to support their kids, all as a means to acquiring a valuable sort of cultural capital, which is English. It taps into all these questions of the highly competitive nature of South Korean society, of class distinctions and the widening gap between the rich and poor. It all hinges on access to English and English language education.

Does that play out in the popular culture context?

It’s definitely in the K-pop and in the songs, but the role that English versus Korean plays in K-pop songs is a little bit different in the sense that the same band will sing the same songs differently depending on who the target audience is. Younger Koreans, the teens and 20s who are listening to this stuff, they’re not bothered at all by the fact that they sing in English. It’s the older people who get concerned about the presence of English. The people marketing the K-pop stuff are very shrewd about this, calculating who’s listening where, and they change the lyrics accordingly.

Some of these lightning rods, do they come up in relation to modern migration?

In the context of, say, migrant workers or mail-order brides, it’s not about English; rather, it’s ‘why don’t you speak Korean? You need to speak Korean. You need to become Korean’. There’s this sense that you have to learn the language, which, of course, they aren’t really given good resources to achieve and even if they do, they’re still not accepted as Koreans. There’s a double standard.

Are the children who have a Korean parent and a parent who is a migrant worker or foreign wife considered ‘Korean’?

I’m not an expert on the legalities of immigration and how you achieve citizenship, but even if you do technically achieve Korean citizenship, you’re not treated as an equal. They don’t even treat their fellow co-ethnics as equal human beings. Koreans from China, especially the women who are most of the waitress population in Seoul and the cleaners and the maids and so on, they’re not treated nicely. The Koreans from the former Soviet Union have an even more difficult time because they’ve completely lost spoken Korean and have to learn it from scratch. They have a very difficult time and have a very strong identity of their own that’s very different from South Korea. Co-ethnics from outside Korea face all kinds of discrimination.

The other really interesting population are the North Korean defectors of whom there are a great many now and who are sort of watched in a kind of morbid way on television through popular talk shows which are attempting to find a way to reconcile this widening cultural difference between South and North. But on the language side, they all say that the hardest thing for them coming to South Korea is learning how to sound like a South Korean and pass as a South Korean, because you can tell right away if you’re from the North by the way you speak. When defectors first come to South Korea, they’re placed in a special government-run kind of holding school where a big part of the curriculum is learning Korean. But the hardest thing for them is learning the English that Koreans are always using, these English words which they’ve never encountered in speech in North Korea.

The lightning rod point in North Korea, to judge from what is coming out in their language planning periodicals, is South Korean language. You’re basically marked for some sort of punishment in North Korea if you’re caught using forms that are seen as South Korean, because so much South Korean content is getting into the country either on thumb drives or CD-ROMs or these balloons that are flown over; and people are watching K-pop. About 10 years ago now, there was a kerfuffle in the North Korean press because certain North Korean women in Pyongyang were answering their cell phones in a ‘South Korean’ way. There was a stream of articles essentially trying to police how women talk. They didn’t come out and say explicitly that ‘you shouldn’t talk like South Koreans’, but the target was certain forms that could only have come in through South Korean media. They don’t have a thing about English up there, nor do they even have anything to do with Russia and Russian. They’re hermetically sealed that way from other languages, but they’re very sensitive about South Korean cultural and linguistic influence.

We’ve talked a bit about national identity, but what about the Korean language and the way that it might help or hinder people forming their other identities, for example words that have discriminatory notions in relation to women, LGBTIQ+ communities or disabled people?

It’s definitely a hot topic, although I think it’s more of a hot topic in research than it is on the street and in policymaking so far. It’s only emerged as a major topic in South Korea in the last 15 years, this question of ‘what is discriminatory language? How do we change it?’. It started off as being more focused on gender and gender language or basically de-gendering certain kinds of forms that were marked as essentially female. The language itself does not have gender, but there are certain prefixes you can put on words that indicate that it’s meant to be a woman. The idea was to get rid of forms like that and to make certain terms for different kinds of professions neutral in terms of the assumed gender in the word. That has been a flashpoint. Another one is what they call 호칭 hoch’ing, this idea of ‘how do you address someone, what do you call them?’. And certain terms have gone out of fashion. It used to be when you went to order a beer in a bar 20 years ago, you would call the young woman serving you, 아가씨 agassi, which is a word which means a young unmarried female. Now that’s considered sexist, but no one’s really sure what you’re supposed to call them now, so all these other terms have come into play. It’s very much in flux, both this question of 호칭 hoch’ing or how you address people, and some of the terms for different professions. Also, the question of people with disabilities has come up and how you refer to them. Lots of different terms have been proposed. LGBTIQ+ is still a really touchy subject. The current regime in South Korea is explicitly anti-LGBTQI+, anti-feminist, and pretty regressive in many ways. In fact, if anything, it has almost encouraged incel-type attitudes amongst young men. The last election was kind of carried by incel-type male voters in their late teens and 20s who really think women are taking away all their opportunities.

Occasionally, pamphlets or glossaries are published saying ‘here’s a list of words that we really should retire and replace with this other more neutral expression’, but you can’t legislate that. The one government body that is tasked with language policy, which is the National Institute of Korean Language, is certainly concerned about it, is researching it, and I think even put out one of those lists recently. It’s certainly a policy concern and a concern of people in general, especially if you belong to one of these groups that has often been the butt of certain kinds of discriminatory language.

What efforts are there to regulate language? Can you talk a bit more about the National Institute of Korean Language and how it works?

The National Institute of the Korean Language is the official language planning government institute. Shortly after the turn of the new millennium, there was a piece of legislation that was passed, the 국어기본법 Kugŏ kibonpŏp, the ‘fundamental law for the national language’. In schools, when you take Korean as an obligatory subject in a Korean school, it’s not called Korean, it’s called ‘the National Language’, which is a terminology that Korea got from Japan. It is a piece of legislation which lays out guidelines as to what should happen, how many hours per week. It’s an ideological position piece and what’s interesting about it is the entire document doesn’t mention Chinese characters, even once. They also maintain and manage the huge standard dictionary, so there’s ongoing lexicographical work.

They are increasingly expected to play a role in promoting the Korean language overseas to foreign learners and to co-ethnics who live overseas, but the budget they have for promoting the language overseas is minimal. It’s more of a research institute than a legislative or policy-setting institute and they do a lot of research in the sense of on-the-street surveys, finding out how people are speaking. The director of the National Institute is a high government rank, not as high as the Minister of Culture, but it’s a pretty high government rank. The director at the time of this interview is the first woman director.

How well do you think Korea is promoting its language outside Korea and what concerns do you have?

I think they’ve been caught off guard because for a long time—the last 2,000 years—no one cared about learning Korean except for spies, missionaries and military people. Now, because of K-pop it’s exploding everywhere. The Modern Language Association records the enrollments in foreign languages at post-secondary level in the USA (they’ve been doing this since the 1950s). Across the board, Korean in the last 15 years is up 175 percent and just in the last five years it’s up 75 percent. It’s literally the only language in North America that is growing. Everyone who is teaching Korean is struggling to hire new teaching staff to meet the demand. It’s a really interesting moment for Korea as a nation to promote themselves, but I think they’re basically screwing it up because on the one hand there is a very proprietary attitude: ‘we own Korean and we’re going to control it’. There’s no sense of funding people outside Korea to do it their own way or find another way that might be more appropriate for those particular conditions.

On the other hand there is a kind of inferiority complex about the language and culture because they’re spending billions of dollars trying to learn English and promote English language education. If the South Koreans had some kind of English-as-a-second-language tax, even a miniscule tax, on the profits of the ESL industry in Korea and put those funds into promoting Korean overseas it would increase the current budget by about 10 times. There is a real reluctance to put the level of funds into promoting Korean similar to what Japan was putting into promoting Japanese from the 1970s. There’s no comparison—what the Korea Foundation spends is a fraction of what the Japan Foundation was doing from 1972, 20 years before the Japanese economy tanked. So, what we have is Japanese still being learned around the world despite the fact that the Japanese economy has been in the doldrums for more than two decades. A lot of it was not just government money but also Japanese business money. To date, Korean industry and the big Korean corporations have not contributed a cent. They are still afraid of this label ‘made in Korea’. I think the tide is turning, but many people still don’t know that Hyundai, Samsung, LG and other big conglomerates are Korean. These companies have no incentive to put their name on scholarship funds or research institutes and the Korean government puts in peanuts. They’ve also been very poor so far in differentiating the different kinds of Korean language education that are needed and the different kinds of materials that are needed for different countries and circumstances; as well as different kinds of learners with different purposes. They barrel ahead with not very exciting material and they are putting all their eggs in one basket with the Sejong Institutes, named after the King who invented the alphabet. It’s a kind of copycat Confucious Institute. The Sejong Institutes don’t have the problem of being controversial because they are not connected to an undemocratic regime, but they don’t know who their audience is and they’ve had no success in North America. They tend to have been successful in places that supply workers for Korean factories such as Vietnam and Uzbekistan where learning Korean for someone is a ticket to getting a job with a Korean company. That’s not the case in North America or Western Europe. The way the government approaches the Sejong Institutes is as the Korean answer to Alliance Française or the Goethe Institute—it’s not academic, it’s for people with a casual, personal interest in learning a little bit of the target language. It’s a good thing to have, but it’s not Korean Studies. Korean Studies is expensive if you want professorships or PhD fellowships to train experts who can interpret Korea and they’re not putting that money on the table.

My fear is that is if they don’t get their act together in the next 5-10 years they are going to miss the boat. I’m amazed that K-pop is still going. The attitude has been that ‘we don’t need to fund this stuff because foreigners will spend their own money to learn the language’. They might do that for the first six months but it takes a long time to learn a language—especially Korean. There is an overconfidence in the ability of K-pop to take the day and a great reluctance, because of poor budgets, to fund anything more ambitious. There is a golden opportunity now because K-pop is still going strong. Not many people want to learn Chinese. I don’t know what it’s like in Australia, but Mandarin enrolments in the USA are tanking and everyone is terrified of going to China. Even Japanese is down in the last five years. Of these three very difficult languages for Anglophones to learn, Korean is in many ways the most attractive. This is the time for Korean policy makers to jump on this and also twist the arms of all their big corporations and say ‘we’ll give you a tax break if you put some multi-million dollar gifts on the table for what would be game-changing kinds of investments’. In the USA, we are lucky to get maybe two gifts of 2.5 million dollars a year for a university Korean Studies program out of the Korea Foundation. In 1972, Japan gave 10, one million dollar gifts to 10 universities and continued to do that every year for two decades. In today’s terms that’s six million dollars a pop. Korea is in the top 12 largest economies in the world by GDP and they have K-pop but they are still throwing pennies at this particular project. I think they are really missing an opportunity.

Do you see that situation changing?

I don’t, because the only person telling them that is me. What their media is telling them is ‘700 people signed up for Korean at the Sorbonne University in France this year. We’re so popular!’. They keep reporting these feel good stories about how everyone is signing up for Korean classes, but what they don’t tell you is that six months later they stop because they don’t see a path forward. They don’t see scholarships, bursaries or funded opportunities to study for a long period of time. The other attitude that I see is the notion that ‘we shouldn’t be funding Korean Studies in North America or Europe because these are rich countries’, as if the students are rich. The students are all in debt and they are not going to spend their money to pursue Korean unless it’s well subsidized and leads somewhere. There is not a nuanced approach to how to do it.

I think Korea and Koreans are at a really interesting turning point in their history. Never have so many people outside of Korea been so interested in learning about the country and tackling the language. But there are so many obstacles in the way and it behooves Koreans, whether policy makers or companies or private citizens in the street, to figure out a way to capitalise before it’s too late. When I started learning the language in 1980 there were less than 400 learners in the USA and now there are 20,000. That’s a lot of growth and I’d like to see that continue, but it’s an uphill battle without the level of support that Korea is capable of giving.

This interview has been edited slightly for clarity and length.

Image: A crowd with South Korean flags at the Asian Nations Cup – Jordan and South Korea, February 2024. Credit: M.Sadegh Nikgostar/Flickr.