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

[Yuh Ji-Yeon]

Dear Colleagues,

I would have to agree with Ross that language maintenance has to do with 
attitudes toward language and social policies toward language. More to the 
point, language maintenance or lack of it has a great deal to do with 
attitudes toward and policies of assimilation and is fundamentally bound up 
with the experience of being a minority and/or an immigrant. Similarities 
between the language lost and the newly acquire language have nothing to do 
with it. Koreans in America, for example, have lost Korean language ability 
at amazing rates, so much so that it is common to meet even 1.5 generation 
Korean Americans who have come at relatively late ages -- nine, ten, 
eleven, or older -- and have somehow managed to lose nearly all Korean 
language ability in favor of English. These Korean Americans often have 
parents who insist on English even in the home, but some also have parents 
who don't speak much English at all.

In contrast, those in China have retained a remarkable level of language 
maintenance, particularly those in ethnic Korean regions who have attended 
Korean schools run under China's national minorities policy. But as 
attitudes toward assimilation have changed and ethnic Koreans there seek 
greater social and economic integration, language loss seems to be rising. 
Korean schools are losing students as parents prefer to send children to 
Chinese schools so that they can better compete in mainstream Chinese 
society and not be relegated to ethnic Korean society, where there are 
fewer and fewer economic and professional opportunities.

There are many indications that language loss and maintenance are issues 
better suited for sociologists or anthropologists to tackle, not linguists, 
unless linguistics break outs of its currently narrow confines. While there 
are few studies I know of on these issues, there are signs that linguistics 
is broadening. There have been some good studies in sociolinguistics, for 
example.

Best,
Ji-Yeon

At 01:56 PM 2004.10.23, you wrote:
>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

Yuh, Ji-Yeon
Assistant Professor of History
Associate Director of Asian American Studies
Northwestern University
Harris 202
1881 Sheridan Road
Evanston, IL 60208 USA
j-yuh at northwestern.edu
1-847-467-6538
fax: 1-847-467-1393
[The Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea---<www.asck.org> ]