English in Korea

The English language as such is a relative newcomer to the linguistic landscape in Korea. First contact between Koreans and Americans was established in 1866 and the first English school, with the purpose of training interpreters, was established in 1883 (Nahm, Reference Nahm1993: 152). During the Japanese occupation from 1910 to 1945, English was introduced to the modern school system as a general classroom subject. But when the war with the United States started ‘in the last few years of colonial rule […] English was considered an enemy language and teaching it in schools was virtually forbidden [again]’ (Shim & Baik, Reference Shim, Baik, Kam and Wong2004: 174). After World War II the USAMGIK (United States Army Military Government in Korea) took command in Korea. Even though this governing commission was only effective for three years, around 28,000 American soldiers were still stationed in Korea in 2012 (Marshall, Reference Marshall2012). This has ultimately led the US to gain a dominant role and explains the influence of American English rather than British English in the country. Since 1997, English education is mandatory from third grade elementary school on (Jung & Norton, Reference Jung, Norton and Tollefson2002: 247), but private English education often starts even earlier in children's lives (if their parents can afford it). Parents can send their children to English-language kindergartens or at least enroll them into English classes in ‘regular’ Korean-language kindergartens.

English has a dichotomous status in Korea: on the one hand, English is ‘a very important status symbol, if not a necessary factor for success in life’ (Shim & Baik, Reference Shim, Baik, Kam and Wong2004: 182); it is basically the ‘language of ultimate importance’ (Park, Reference Park2009: 1). Koreans go to great lengths in order to learn English themselves or grant access to English education for their children. These measures can sometimes become quite extreme (such as the now famous phenomenon of wild-goose fathers, who work in Korea but send their children and wives to English-speaking countries). Those not affluent enough to send their children or families abroad can visit ‘English villages’ in Korea, which replicate Western towns, with shops and localities staffed with native English speakers. Korean schoolchildren spend many hours in afterschool English institutes (known as hagwon)Footnote ¹ and there have even been cases reported of tongue surgeries which are supposed to enable Korean children to pronounce retroflex consonants better (Demick, Reference Demick2002). Korean desires for English acquisition can become so radical and extreme that they have been likened to a disease, being referred to as English Fever (Park, Reference Park2009), English Sickness (Kim, Reference Kim2008) and English Frenzy (Shim & Park, Reference Shim and Park2008).

On the other hand, Korea has traditionally always been shaped by strong monolingualism and monoculturalism (see e.g. Park, Reference Park, Wee, Goh and Lim2013: 287) and English is therefore sometimes seen as a language infringing upon Korean identity (Park, Reference Park2009). Being Korean is strongly connected to speaking Korean. Nevertheless, English has a special place in the public linguistic mindset, which might also be connected to the fact that even though

The linguistic outcome of the situation described above can be summarized under two headings: the Englishization of the Korean language and the nativization of English in the Korean context. Englishization of the Korean language refers to the influence English has exerted on Korean, such as the immense influx of English loanwords (Shim, Reference Shim1994) and morpho-syntactic changes of Korean structures (e.g. regarding plural formation, pronouns and tense markings; Baik, Reference Baik1994). Conversely, Korean has also influenced the way English is spoken in the southern part of the Korean peninsula (see e.g. Shim, Reference Shim1999 on the use of codified Korean English in Korean textbooks), which is subsumed under the aspect of nativization in the Korean context. This nativization of English in the Korean context is the focus of my on-going research on Koreanized English.

Data

English in Korea has so far mainly been investigated from a sociolinguistic or language acquisitional point of view, i.e. previous research has focused on language attitudes and questions of second language acquisition in the Korean context. Many studies have been undertaken to inform English language teaching in Korea. Some structural characteristics of English in Korea have been reported anecdotally, usually from the personal experience of the respective scientists, without corroborating them with larger data collection. From my own personal experience, I can also attest to the idea of structural characteristics of English in Korea being in emergence but it is indeed crucial to back up these hunches with substantial amounts of data. Therefore, I am currently collecting a corpus of spoken English by adult Korean speakers. Until the completion of this corpus, I am working with pilot data (~400 minutes) which consists of interviews with Korean pop stars (particularly Psy, notorious for his song Gangnam Style), sociolinguistic interviews with Korean university students and video-blogs in English.

Emerging patterns of Koreanized English?

The existence of nativization processes have been acknowledged and investigated in numerous studies on new Englishes in general and ELF (English as a lingua franca) more specifically. Transfer from the substrate (i.e. the indigenous) language is widely recognized as influencing nativized linguistic structures. In her study of the variety of English used on Cyprus, for example, Buschfeld (Reference Buschfeld2013) considers the impact of Modern Greek and the Greek-Cypriot dialect. When it comes to finding potential features of Expanding Circle Englishes, researchers often stumble over the problem of how to differentiate ‘genuine’ variety features from language learners’ errors. As Mollin (Reference Mollin2007: 171–172) suggests, several aspects need to be considered here: nativization processes generally result in variation on all linguistic levels (i.e. phonology, lexicon, grammar and discourse styles) and respectively developed nativized features are used by a large part of the speech community. Furthermore, the new features must follow a certain systematicity and the speakers using them are ideally not trying to follow English native speaker norms (and their failure then resulting in the features under scrutiny). Instead, having no desire to conform to a native speaker standard, they judge their own language output as perfectly acceptable (Mollin, Reference Mollin2007: 171–172).

Several researchers list and describe linguistic features frequently occurring in new or developing varieties of English. Platt et al. (Reference Platt, Weber and Ho1984) for example, mention the following aspects as susceptible for change in a new English context: plurality, articles, quantifiers, possessive marking, pronouns, adjectives, word order, conjunctions and tense and aspect. Sharma (Reference Sharma and Raymond2012: 213) condenses the topic of shared features in New Englishes to six similar aspects: irregular use of articles, leveling of present perfect and simple past, extended range of progressive uses, shadow pronouns, loose sequence of tense rules and invariant non-concord tags. Using these feature groups as a starting point and indexing the pilot data described above for them, the following patterns could be identified:

1. (1) Reduced redundancy in number agreement:

   there is a lot of english word [M-INT1]Footnote ²

   uh i have twin [M-INT4]

2. (2) Irregular use of articles (e.g. definite article with proper nouns):

   on the twitter britney spears followed me [M-INT2]

   and i do the dance move with the kevin hart [M-INT2]

   a lot of people are complaining about different meaning of the konglish [F-INT3]

3. (3) Irregular use of pronouns (e.g. inanimate third person pronoun for animate beings):

   it's managing justin bieber [M-INT2]

   ah because it didn't get the visa yet so [M-INT5]

4. (4) Zero-realization of past tense:

   i hardly attend the school so the thing is […] [M-INT2]

   he laughs all night long [M-INT4]

   yah i sing it twice [F-INT10]

5. (5) Semantic change:

   kangnam's like certain territory in korea [M-INT4]

   a lot of uhm talent or actor or actress they are using a lot of english words [M-INT3]

   some people say that it is not uh exact expressions [F-INT11]

Some of these emerging patterns could possibly be traced back to substrate language influence, i.e. influences the Korean language has on the English spoken in Korea. Patterns (1), (2) and (3) are potential candidates for this explanation. Pattern (1) is concerned with plural formation. In Korean it is optional to add the plural marker (deul) to nouns in sentences where the context already indicates the plurality or where the plurality of the noun is not relevant (Yeon & Brown, Reference Yeon and Brown2011: 121).Footnote ³ In the example given above (‘there is a lot of english word’), plural marking would be optional in Korean since the quantifier ‘a lot’ already indicates the plurality of the noun (‘word’). The same logical process applies to the second example given (‘uh i have twin’). Since the semantic content of the word already indicates its plurality (i.e. it is not possible to be parent of only one twin), it is not necessary in Korean to add a plural marker to the word twins (ssang-dung-i) in this context. It is possible, that Korean speakers of English transfer this pattern from their native Korean language to the way they speak English.

The irregular use of articles could also be explained in terms of native language interference. Korean as such lacks articles completely (see Yeon & Brown, Reference Yeon and Brown2011: 42–43). The concept of using articles could simply be difficult for Korean speakers of English to grasp and apply. This explanation would posit this pattern in the realm of learner errors rather than a possible feature of Koreanized English. An argument against the straightforward analysis as an error made by language learners is the (at least partial) systematicity of variation. The definite article is for example frequently used in combination with proper nouns (e.g. ‘on the twitter’, ‘the kevin hart’, ‘the konglish’). This propensity of Koreans to use definite articles in combination with proper nouns seems to be systematicFootnote ⁴ but further studies are needed in order to investigate reasons for this variation. A similar line of argumentation can be followed for Pattern (3) when one keeps in mind that it is very difficult to apply the English pronoun system to Korean (for detailed information on the Korean pronoun system see Yeon & Brown, Reference Yeon and Brown2011: 75–82). For the pattern introduced (inanimate third person pronoun for animate beings), it will be sufficient to mention that ‘[t]echnically speaking, Korean has no proper third-person pronouns at all’ (Yeon & Brown, Reference Yeon and Brown2011: 78).Footnote ⁵ Again, the systematicity of variation can be held against simple analysis as a learner error.

Other patterns (e.g. pattern (4) above) seem to be unrelated to influences from Korean language structures and could be results of the language acquisition process in general (i.e. interlanguage features), features common to varieties of English (i.e. Angloversals) or simply individual differences between speakers (i.e. idiolectal features). Larger amounts of data can substantiate the patterns described above and weed out those features which are merely due to the idiolect of individual persons. It is also expected that more patterns will come up during tagging and analysis of the corpus.