Bilingualism in a Monoethnic Nation: migration and language in South Korea
This project explores how bilingualism in mixed-ethnic Korean families connects to individual identities and broader national and citizenship discourses.
As an emerging immigrant-receiving country, Korean national discourses on migrant integration and language over the last two decades have essentially focused on “the multicultural family” (a family consisting of a Korean, a foreign spouse, and their offspring). Since 2003, about 10% of marriages in Korea have been ‘cross-border’, constituting a significant number of multicultural families. The resulting increase in children from such ‘multicultural’ families in schools, alongside the rapid decrease in the number of children overall due to Korea’s low fertility rate (0.78 in 2022, the lowest among OECD countries), has spawned some public debate and policy initiatives focused on ‘multicultural’ children’s language acquisition. While some policies promote bilingualism through emphasising the cosmopolitan values of multiculturalism and the economic utility of bilingual people for the nation, others champion monolingualism as the best way to sustain national identity. Multicultural families must negotiate these conflicting discourses on language, while residing in a country that has long been constructed as ‘ethnically homogenous’.
This project takes a critical social approach to language formation to understand how such families in contemporary South Korea negotiate between encouraging their children’s bilingualism and conforming to monolingualism, what affects this process, and why they take certain pathways. By showing how the social formation of language relates to individual positionalities, wider discourses of nation and citizenship, and the interactions between the two, this project aims to uncover the intersectional ways in which national boundaries are drawn through language.
It has three objectives:1) To identify how bilingualism is framed in relation to the broader discourse of nation and citizenship in Korea. This is to comprehend how the inclusion and exclusion of diverse ethnic families within a common-sense notion of national membership is centred around language practice at different institutional levels.; 2) To examine the processes involved where bilingualism is achieved for children within diverse ethnic families. This inquiry includes what factors affect this social process and to what extent, and how individuals negotiate and interact with the national discourses.; 3) To explore the wider implications of this language use, it pays attention to how language serves as a key site through which to examine the intersectional formation of social inequality.
To achieve these objectives, the project employs a mixed method including using discourse analysis, quantitative analysis, and qualitative analysis through in-depth interviews.
This research is funded by the Leverhulme Trust’s Early Career Fellowship scheme and runs from May 2024 to April 2027.
