South Korean Languages December 31, 2016 0 Comments latl Abstract South Korea is considered one of the most linguistically homogenous countries worldwide, and this image is promulgated by governmental policies, the educational system, and linguistic scholars. In South Korean schools, the majority of classroom hours are allocated to “correct use of the Korean language” (Song 2012:30) and popular television shows promote prescriptivist grammar and lexicon (Seth 2011:25). However, Jejueo, the indigenous language of Jeju Island, South Korea, is less than 12% mutually intelligible with Korean (O’Grady 2015). Jejueo is classified as critically endangered, with 5,000 to 10,000 speakers all over the age of 70 (UNESCO 2010) and language use rapidly shifting to Korean. The social and economic reforms of the New Village Movement in the 1970s created a diglossia on Jeju Island, where Jejueo was prohibited from use in the media, education, religion and all official capacities. Recent work on Jejueo language ideologies (Kim 2011, Kim 2013) suggests that speakers maintain ideologies rooted in the former diglossia, as Korean is used as a language of “distance and rationality” (Kim 2013). This paper discusses the possibilities for Jejueo status planning and revitalization within the larger sociohistorical context of Korean language ideologies. Kim, Soon-Ja. 2011. A Geolinguistic Study on the Jeju Dialect. Jeju: Jeju National University Ph.D. dissertation. Kim, Soung-U. 2013. Language attitudes on Jeju Island – an analysis of attitudes towards language choice from an ethnographic perspective. London: SOAS MA dissertation. O’Grady, William. 2015. Documenting language-hood. Proceedings from ICLDC 4. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Sohn, Ho-Min. 1999. The Korean Language. Cambridge University Press. Song, Jae Jung. 2012. South Korea: language policy and planning in the making. Current Issues in Language Planning 13(1). 1-68. UNESCO Culture Sector. 2010. Concerted efforts for the revitalization of Jeju language. Online: http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/endangered-languages/news/dynamic- contentsingleviewnews/news/concerted_efforts_for_the_revitalization_of_jeju_language/ #.U1WeFFeZi4Y. Accessed 10 February 2015.
