[KS] Korean edge: Japanese learning Korean and Korean becoming Japanese?

[jrpking]

Dear List: 

Lee JooBai, in his inimitably impenetrable style, posed a number of interesting questions in this posting. 

He found the two articles (thanks for the links) "striking" and somehow mutually contradictory, but the meteoric rise in popularity of Korean as a second/foreign language recently in Japan is well known (and DOES contrast with its status in North America, where it seems doomed to languish for the foreseeable future), and surely it comes as no surprise that fewer and fewer ethnic Koreans in Japan actually speak (or study) Korean anymore. Ethnic Koreans pretty much everywhere outside of Korea seem to abandon their heritage tongue at a rate significantly faster than other ethnic groups (and there are plenty of Koreans even in Korea working very hard to divorce themselves and their children from any appreciation of or long-term commitment to knowledge of Korean in favor of a "globalization" interpreted as English-mania...).

But the real "condundrum" for me (apart from divining from Mr. Lee's prose what the conundrum is for _him_) is why, as Lee JooBai seems to imply, "grammatical similarity" or "drilling in Chinese characters" should have anything to do with language maintenance at all. All the research in this field shows that language maintenance has most to do with language attitudes and language ideologies (as well as language policies and societal ideologies), if it has to do with anything. 

As for the postings by Bart Mathias, all those linguistic facts are true, but again, language maintenance is not a problem that can be reduced to linguistic formulae and correspondences. In fact, it is a subject about which linguists (in the current, academic commonsense meaning of this word, which is desperately narrow, indeed) have little to say at all. And this is why Mr. Lee's attempts to relate, in turn, the loss of Korean language by ethnic Koreans in China to facts about Sino-Korean pronunciation, seem fundamentally misguided. 

Cheers,



--
Ross King
Associate Professor of Korean, University of British Columbia
and 
Dean, Korean Language Village, Concordia Language Villages