Discussing a number of examples of language practices in different Asian contexts – from a job advertisement for English teachers in Vietnam, to injunctions to speak good English in Singapore, from mission statements on a Philippine convent wall, to an article about temple elephants in India – this paper argues that it is not so much language as language ideology that is the object of language policy. While ostensibly dealing with the distribution and regulation of languages, language policies are generally about something else entirely, be it educational, ideological or cultural regulation. Local language practices, meanwhile, may appear to be subject to language policies, but since language policies are always about a different understanding of language, it is this understanding rather than the practices themselves, that are at stake. By insisting on the plannability of language, state authorities insist that a sterile and state-serving view of language is the language ideology we should adhere to. State language policies, therefore, have more to do with the regulation of language ideologies than with the regulation of local language practices, which, despite attempts to contain them, always exceed confinement.
After being subjected to ‘the imperialism of language’ for centuries like other colonized people through the media, education and other instruments of colonial power, educated Indians have ‘decolonized’ English through the invention of a new hybrid formed through the mixing of English with Hindi, which was followed by mixing with other Indian languages. Although Indian English has always been used out of innocence or ignorance and has been normalized as a register of English, Hinglish, a mix of Hindi and English, was first used to great effect by a film tabloid called Stardust in the 1970s under the editorship of the popular fiction writer Shobha De(nee Rajadhyaksha) and entered the vocabulary of educated, middle class speakers. But it was only when Salman Rushdie employed a non-Standard register of English, a mix of Hindi/Urdu with English, in his novel Midnight’s Children (1980) that Hinglish acquired literary respectability. Through comparing “the stylish language of Bollywood, of FM radio and of national advertising” with the “aspirational language” of speakers of bhashas[Modern Indian languages] disdainfully described as “vernacs[vernaculars]” by elite speakers of English, this essay focuses on cultural politics of different varieties of Hinglish in India to argue that while ushering in linguistic democraticization, Hinglish has not been able to bridge social difference.
Though the main story of globalization in Applied Linguistics is the spread of global English and the loss of indigenous languages, this paper emphasizes the less commonly known view that globalization supports multilingualism. I argue that despite the onslaught of globalization in India, there is language maintenance and not language shift. In keeping with the contentions of Dor (2004), Soh (2005), and Bhatia and Richie (2004), the entrenchment of Hindi is explored in detail. Using a grounded process of data analysis, 200 photos and artefacts depicting the linguistic ecology of Delhi are qualitatively analyzed. Though in the monoliterate text the spread of English is palpable, all other biliterate text types are illustrations of the entrenched nature of Hindi.
The politics of English is inseparable from the politics of other languages in multicultural, multilingual (South and Southeast) Asia; in few other places is this more painfully felt than Sri Lanka, where ethnolinguistic issues have embroiled the country in civil war for a quarter of a century. A source of this conflict, its origin in British rule, is the provision of English education, as a scarce commodity, affording better employment opportunities and socioeconomic advancement. With the Tamil minority viewed as privileged in the colonial system, more protectionist measures were sought in independence for the Sinhala ethnic majority through a ’Sinhala Only’ language policy, all this leading to the country’s polarization. Crucially, English has continued to be the major instrument of the dominant bilingual westernised elite, the kaduva (Sinhala ‘sword’), with the power to divide those with and without access to the language. More recent state discourse, however, reframes English as a functionally different tool, one for communication for knowledge and employment. Two aspects are notable: (i) that English be delivered and desired purely for its utility value, while Sinhala and Tamil associate with cultural values and identities; and (ii) that English be an important tool (along with ICT) for rural empowerment, with user-friendliness rather than correctness of grammar and pronunciation emphasized (contrasting interestingly with Singapore’s situation). Such a shift, in users and competence in English, beyond the exonormative, elite minority may mean a development of Sri Lankan English(es) more in line with the broader multilingual ecology, holding intriguing possibilities for its evolution and appropriation.
During colonial times, the English language occupied a dominant position, but the colonial educational system was not a mass or egalitarian system. The presence of the colonial masters had a suffocating effect on the creative energies of the local inhabitants and literature in English emerges paradoxically from the growth of nationalist currents. In its early phase, this literature can be termed mimicry. The potential insurgency of mimicry is evident in an adoption of an indigenous identity at times. When writers began to feel nationalist currents keenly, their central problem was reconciling their own sensibility, indigenous traditions and realities, on the one hand, and Western literary and other traditions and influences, on the other. Once this clash of cultures phase was over, the poets wrote out of their personal situations. For some writers, the choice or adoption of English was a major problem, while it was not so for others. But both groups had to adapt English to express realities alien to it and convey their own indigenous spirit. We have now moved beyond the ‘Prospero-Caliban syndrome’.
A critical assessment of Singapore’s language policy, focusing specifically on issues and challenges that arise from the government’s positioning of the English language, shows how the policy needs to be understood in relation to the government’s attempt to maintain harmony in an ethnolinguistically diverse society while ensuring that the society as a whole is economically competitive in a globalizing world. A number of particular challenges for the language policy are discussed as regards the management of English. The paper ends with some observations about how this policy might ultimately have to be modified in order to address these challenges. In particular, it suggests that there is a need for greater autonomy in language policy, in order to accommodate the increasingly diverse identities and experiences of Singaporeans.
The role and place of English in Singapore is shaped by a number of key cultural factors, including the nation’s colonial legacy, its multi-racial and multi-lingual society (and how this is handled by government policy), the push to position Singapore as a global city attracting transnational capital and flows of talent, and similar issues. These factors combine to create cultural tensions between language and race identifiers (for example, being of Chinese ethnic origin, being a recent arrival from China, speaking Chinese dialects, and speaking the Mandarin Chinese endorsed by the government), between different racial-linguistic communities (for example, Anglophone Singaporeans and speakers predominantly of Asian languages), and the peculiar tensions between varieties of “standard” English affiliated to global cultural flows (American media, living and studying in the U.K. or Australia) and the local variety known as “Singlish” that is affiliated with a localized (and especially everyman or underclass) Singapore identity. An account of English vis-à-vis the cultural landscape of Singapore thus also becomes an account of the geopolitics of identity and culture, as Singapore attempts to come to terms with global flows and competitions.
Malay is the national language of Malaysia. As such, there have been various policies and rules implemented to ensure that it is a dominant and widely used language in the country. However, its position and integrity have been pressured by the former colonial language, English. This chapter gives some examples of how English has permeated Malay cultural expression in literature, film and in the language of songs, and the various reactions to this, both positive and negative. Although the integrity of the language might be affected by excessive use of English words or phrases, some borrowings from English might be useful, especially if there are no equivalent words in Malay. While the dividing lines between practicality and linguistic integrity, and between aesthetic independence and the dilution of culture, may not always be clear, there are some examples, as discussed in this chapter, which could have resulted in a more moderate response.
If language policies offer insights into a country’s national and cultural identity, Malaysia portrays a conflicted self. While the official stand is that English competence is highly valued and encouraged, this public discourse does not always accord with or prevail against deep-seated suspicions and hostilities that the language arouses in certain segments of the community. In an examination of the complex politics of English in Malaysia, this essay focuses on the schisms between state ideology, community practices and daily experiences of learners who seek to live and function in contested spaces. Bringing together micro and macro perspectives, it examines the reflective journal writings of Malay students engaged in the linguistic practice of English. By drawing on constructivism to theorize and examine the data, the analysis shows how the use of English in what is deemed ‘Malay spaces’ problematizes English, unwittingly positions it as the ‘linguistic other’ and implicates political, ideological and identity struggles.
The grip of English in the Philippines signifies an enduring and flawed image of national development that is monocentric with an English-dominant core. It traces the trajectory of this dominance of English in the Philippines from its introduction as the de facto medium of instruction in the public school system during the American colonial era to its incorporation as the indispensable competitive edge of Filipinos in the current era of globalization. This privileged position of English in the country’s linguistic economy has been reinforced by the Filipino elite’s symbolic struggles over power in the wake of post-colonialism and the country’s structural insertion at the margins of the global economy as a source of cheap, English-speaking migrant labor. The grip of English in the country may be mitigated by the introduction of mother tongue based multilingual education (MTBLE). The framework of MTBLE appears to conceive of national development in terms of widening access to valuable material and symbolic resources such as literacy and higher levels of formal education. As the MTBLE is still in its infancy, the extent to which it can live up to its promise remains to be seen.
In the Philippines, state policies for economic development focus on two things: attracting foreign investors to set up export-oriented manufacturing and business-process outsourcing industries or supporting the already well-established structures that encourage Filipino workers to find jobs abroad. These three industries have a great impact on Filipino women as it is mostly women who are employed in minimum-wage jobs at manufacturing firms or who are sent abroad as domestic helpers or “entertainers.” With such policies – which rely on foreign investors and employers needing a cheap but trainable labor force – English becomes a necessary skill for Filipino women. Following Bourdieu’s concept of the “structured systems of sociologically pertinent linguistic differences” corresponding to “an equally structured system of social difference,” it is not surprising that Philippine English displays characteristics of this structured system of social difference. This is most evident in a study done in 1995 by Ma. Lourdes Bautista that described three sub-varieties of Philippine English as yaya (nanny) English, bargirl English, and colegiala (Catholic schoolgirl) English. What is immediately striking about this template is both the inscription of the labor-export economy into, and the feminization of, Philippine English. This study examines the relations between language, power, and the new, postmodern, global, economic order of which English is both a catalyst and an offshoot. It will attempt to determine how the relations between the linguistic standard and the sub-varieties correspond to the link between patriarchal state/global capital and the most marginalized groups within that order.
From the mid-1800s, at the end of the Tokugawa feudal period and the beginning of the Meiji era, English has been a singularly important foreign language in Japan which has, since that time, risen to international prominence, mirroring the rise of the English speaking world powers in the west. While English education was limited to the elites at this time, after World War II English education became available to the general public through the newly-implemented public education system. Today, English is considered one of Japan’s most important school subjects, and English conversational skills are regarded as a highly desirable special talent. At the same time, most Japanese do not hide the difficulty they encounter with learning both written and spoken English. Even today Japan remains an essentially monolingual country and average person’s ability to utilize English in any practical capacity is quite limited. This paper discusses Japan’s idealization of native English speakers and the dilemma of learning how to speak like them while at the same time living in an isolated monolingual nation. The Japanese government struggles with appropriate strategies on English education curriculum, leaving considerable room for improvement in the education system. Without revising the current education plan, English will remain a weakness for Japan.
This paper discusses the conflict between language policy and actual practice regarding loanword use in Japan. Localized appropriation of foreign words is nothing new to Japanese history; nevertheless, the Japanese government deems the current influx of loanwords to be “problematic”. A 2007 report by the National Institute for Japanese Language (NIJLA), commissioned by the government, finds that numerous loanwords that appear in public discourse are not understood by the average Japanese person. NIJLA suggested that the most commonly non-understood foreign-language loanwords should be replaced with native Japanese or Sino-Japanese paraphrases instead. Despite the fact that it is the government that first “problematized” this situation, and one of its own institutions that has suggested the countermeasure, my comparative examination of loanword use in public resources reveals that it is primarily government administrators who introduce new loanwords, legitimize them, and treat them as established discourse. I argue that this apparent discrepancy is a conflict between two different forms of language ideology – NIJLA’s (as well as the government’s) essentialist notion of ‘democratic language’ versus actual language use, including the very ‘third space’ language practices of government officials that have arisen within the contexts of the transnational discourse of globalization and internationalism.
This paper interrogates the formation and the representation of the English-speaking subject in modern Korea. Who speaks English in modern Korea and why? The paper offers a literary-historical sketch of representative modern Korean subjects in both Korean and Korean American literature. These subjects, I suggest, open up a troubled history of Korean imaginaries of the English language. Whereas English first appears as a marker of colonial modernity, class privilege, and social striving in early twentieth-century Korean literature, it quickly turns into a much more ambivalent and compromising sign of political and national dispossession in the literature of the Korean War. The evolution of the representative English-speaking Korean subject from the male colonial subject to the female ‘yanggongju’ (western princess) who serves the American military personnel stationed in Korea demonstrates that, in the Korean literary imagination, English has always been deeply connected to national and collective trauma and dispossession, even as it continues to perform as a sign of globalized, elite identity. Recently, we have seen the transnational adoptee emerge in Korean American literature as a prismatic figure embodying, in particularly painful and ironic form, the contradictory identifications demanded by English-language use in contemporary Korea.
English is deeply embedded within recent neoliberal projects of social reformation in South Korea, becoming a central topic of contention in the controversial educational reforms of the Lee Myung-bak regime (2008–2012). It figured prominently in various changes to the Korean education system pursued by the Lee administration under the name of greater competitiveness, such as increasing English immersion instruction in public schools and opening greater number of special purpose high schools where English language skills are highlighted. Lee’s policies on the one hand aimed to cater to middle-class parents’ desire for better educational opportunities that drive the Korean education fever; but on the other hand, they also fueled that very desire by inserting English into a neoliberal social order and imbuing it with cultural significance. Here, the indexical nature of language – how “good English” comes to be interpreted as embodied evidence of not only one’s educational attainment but also one’s previous transnational trajectories, thus positioning the speaker as an experienced cosmopolitan well prepared for “global competition” – plays a central role, as it naturalizes and justifies the classed nature of neoliberal projects despite continued contestation and debate.
Discussing a number of examples of language practices in different Asian contexts – from a job advertisement for English teachers in Vietnam, to injunctions to speak good English in Singapore, from mission statements on a Philippine convent wall, to an article about temple elephants in India – this paper argues that it is not so much language as language ideology that is the object of language policy. While ostensibly dealing with the distribution and regulation of languages, language policies are generally about something else entirely, be it educational, ideological or cultural regulation. Local language practices, meanwhile, may appear to be subject to language policies, but since language policies are always about a different understanding of language, it is this understanding rather than the practices themselves, that are at stake. By insisting on the plannability of language, state authorities insist that a sterile and state-serving view of language is the language ideology we should adhere to. State language policies, therefore, have more to do with the regulation of language ideologies than with the regulation of local language practices, which, despite attempts to contain them, always exceed confinement.
After being subjected to ‘the imperialism of language’ for centuries like other colonized people through the media, education and other instruments of colonial power, educated Indians have ‘decolonized’ English through the invention of a new hybrid formed through the mixing of English with Hindi, which was followed by mixing with other Indian languages. Although Indian English has always been used out of innocence or ignorance and has been normalized as a register of English, Hinglish, a mix of Hindi and English, was first used to great effect by a film tabloid called Stardust in the 1970s under the editorship of the popular fiction writer Shobha De(nee Rajadhyaksha) and entered the vocabulary of educated, middle class speakers. But it was only when Salman Rushdie employed a non-Standard register of English, a mix of Hindi/Urdu with English, in his novel Midnight’s Children (1980) that Hinglish acquired literary respectability. Through comparing “the stylish language of Bollywood, of FM radio and of national advertising” with the “aspirational language” of speakers of bhashas[Modern Indian languages] disdainfully described as “vernacs[vernaculars]” by elite speakers of English, this essay focuses on cultural politics of different varieties of Hinglish in India to argue that while ushering in linguistic democraticization, Hinglish has not been able to bridge social difference.
Though the main story of globalization in Applied Linguistics is the spread of global English and the loss of indigenous languages, this paper emphasizes the less commonly known view that globalization supports multilingualism. I argue that despite the onslaught of globalization in India, there is language maintenance and not language shift. In keeping with the contentions of Dor (2004), Soh (2005), and Bhatia and Richie (2004), the entrenchment of Hindi is explored in detail. Using a grounded process of data analysis, 200 photos and artefacts depicting the linguistic ecology of Delhi are qualitatively analyzed. Though in the monoliterate text the spread of English is palpable, all other biliterate text types are illustrations of the entrenched nature of Hindi.
The politics of English is inseparable from the politics of other languages in multicultural, multilingual (South and Southeast) Asia; in few other places is this more painfully felt than Sri Lanka, where ethnolinguistic issues have embroiled the country in civil war for a quarter of a century. A source of this conflict, its origin in British rule, is the provision of English education, as a scarce commodity, affording better employment opportunities and socioeconomic advancement. With the Tamil minority viewed as privileged in the colonial system, more protectionist measures were sought in independence for the Sinhala ethnic majority through a ’Sinhala Only’ language policy, all this leading to the country’s polarization. Crucially, English has continued to be the major instrument of the dominant bilingual westernised elite, the kaduva (Sinhala ‘sword’), with the power to divide those with and without access to the language. More recent state discourse, however, reframes English as a functionally different tool, one for communication for knowledge and employment. Two aspects are notable: (i) that English be delivered and desired purely for its utility value, while Sinhala and Tamil associate with cultural values and identities; and (ii) that English be an important tool (along with ICT) for rural empowerment, with user-friendliness rather than correctness of grammar and pronunciation emphasized (contrasting interestingly with Singapore’s situation). Such a shift, in users and competence in English, beyond the exonormative, elite minority may mean a development of Sri Lankan English(es) more in line with the broader multilingual ecology, holding intriguing possibilities for its evolution and appropriation.
During colonial times, the English language occupied a dominant position, but the colonial educational system was not a mass or egalitarian system. The presence of the colonial masters had a suffocating effect on the creative energies of the local inhabitants and literature in English emerges paradoxically from the growth of nationalist currents. In its early phase, this literature can be termed mimicry. The potential insurgency of mimicry is evident in an adoption of an indigenous identity at times. When writers began to feel nationalist currents keenly, their central problem was reconciling their own sensibility, indigenous traditions and realities, on the one hand, and Western literary and other traditions and influences, on the other. Once this clash of cultures phase was over, the poets wrote out of their personal situations. For some writers, the choice or adoption of English was a major problem, while it was not so for others. But both groups had to adapt English to express realities alien to it and convey their own indigenous spirit. We have now moved beyond the ‘Prospero-Caliban syndrome’.
A critical assessment of Singapore’s language policy, focusing specifically on issues and challenges that arise from the government’s positioning of the English language, shows how the policy needs to be understood in relation to the government’s attempt to maintain harmony in an ethnolinguistically diverse society while ensuring that the society as a whole is economically competitive in a globalizing world. A number of particular challenges for the language policy are discussed as regards the management of English. The paper ends with some observations about how this policy might ultimately have to be modified in order to address these challenges. In particular, it suggests that there is a need for greater autonomy in language policy, in order to accommodate the increasingly diverse identities and experiences of Singaporeans.
The role and place of English in Singapore is shaped by a number of key cultural factors, including the nation’s colonial legacy, its multi-racial and multi-lingual society (and how this is handled by government policy), the push to position Singapore as a global city attracting transnational capital and flows of talent, and similar issues. These factors combine to create cultural tensions between language and race identifiers (for example, being of Chinese ethnic origin, being a recent arrival from China, speaking Chinese dialects, and speaking the Mandarin Chinese endorsed by the government), between different racial-linguistic communities (for example, Anglophone Singaporeans and speakers predominantly of Asian languages), and the peculiar tensions between varieties of “standard” English affiliated to global cultural flows (American media, living and studying in the U.K. or Australia) and the local variety known as “Singlish” that is affiliated with a localized (and especially everyman or underclass) Singapore identity. An account of English vis-à-vis the cultural landscape of Singapore thus also becomes an account of the geopolitics of identity and culture, as Singapore attempts to come to terms with global flows and competitions.
Malay is the national language of Malaysia. As such, there have been various policies and rules implemented to ensure that it is a dominant and widely used language in the country. However, its position and integrity have been pressured by the former colonial language, English. This chapter gives some examples of how English has permeated Malay cultural expression in literature, film and in the language of songs, and the various reactions to this, both positive and negative. Although the integrity of the language might be affected by excessive use of English words or phrases, some borrowings from English might be useful, especially if there are no equivalent words in Malay. While the dividing lines between practicality and linguistic integrity, and between aesthetic independence and the dilution of culture, may not always be clear, there are some examples, as discussed in this chapter, which could have resulted in a more moderate response.
If language policies offer insights into a country’s national and cultural identity, Malaysia portrays a conflicted self. While the official stand is that English competence is highly valued and encouraged, this public discourse does not always accord with or prevail against deep-seated suspicions and hostilities that the language arouses in certain segments of the community. In an examination of the complex politics of English in Malaysia, this essay focuses on the schisms between state ideology, community practices and daily experiences of learners who seek to live and function in contested spaces. Bringing together micro and macro perspectives, it examines the reflective journal writings of Malay students engaged in the linguistic practice of English. By drawing on constructivism to theorize and examine the data, the analysis shows how the use of English in what is deemed ‘Malay spaces’ problematizes English, unwittingly positions it as the ‘linguistic other’ and implicates political, ideological and identity struggles.
The grip of English in the Philippines signifies an enduring and flawed image of national development that is monocentric with an English-dominant core. It traces the trajectory of this dominance of English in the Philippines from its introduction as the de facto medium of instruction in the public school system during the American colonial era to its incorporation as the indispensable competitive edge of Filipinos in the current era of globalization. This privileged position of English in the country’s linguistic economy has been reinforced by the Filipino elite’s symbolic struggles over power in the wake of post-colonialism and the country’s structural insertion at the margins of the global economy as a source of cheap, English-speaking migrant labor. The grip of English in the country may be mitigated by the introduction of mother tongue based multilingual education (MTBLE). The framework of MTBLE appears to conceive of national development in terms of widening access to valuable material and symbolic resources such as literacy and higher levels of formal education. As the MTBLE is still in its infancy, the extent to which it can live up to its promise remains to be seen.
In the Philippines, state policies for economic development focus on two things: attracting foreign investors to set up export-oriented manufacturing and business-process outsourcing industries or supporting the already well-established structures that encourage Filipino workers to find jobs abroad. These three industries have a great impact on Filipino women as it is mostly women who are employed in minimum-wage jobs at manufacturing firms or who are sent abroad as domestic helpers or “entertainers.” With such policies – which rely on foreign investors and employers needing a cheap but trainable labor force – English becomes a necessary skill for Filipino women. Following Bourdieu’s concept of the “structured systems of sociologically pertinent linguistic differences” corresponding to “an equally structured system of social difference,” it is not surprising that Philippine English displays characteristics of this structured system of social difference. This is most evident in a study done in 1995 by Ma. Lourdes Bautista that described three sub-varieties of Philippine English as yaya (nanny) English, bargirl English, and colegiala (Catholic schoolgirl) English. What is immediately striking about this template is both the inscription of the labor-export economy into, and the feminization of, Philippine English. This study examines the relations between language, power, and the new, postmodern, global, economic order of which English is both a catalyst and an offshoot. It will attempt to determine how the relations between the linguistic standard and the sub-varieties correspond to the link between patriarchal state/global capital and the most marginalized groups within that order.
From the mid-1800s, at the end of the Tokugawa feudal period and the beginning of the Meiji era, English has been a singularly important foreign language in Japan which has, since that time, risen to international prominence, mirroring the rise of the English speaking world powers in the west. While English education was limited to the elites at this time, after World War II English education became available to the general public through the newly-implemented public education system. Today, English is considered one of Japan’s most important school subjects, and English conversational skills are regarded as a highly desirable special talent. At the same time, most Japanese do not hide the difficulty they encounter with learning both written and spoken English. Even today Japan remains an essentially monolingual country and average person’s ability to utilize English in any practical capacity is quite limited. This paper discusses Japan’s idealization of native English speakers and the dilemma of learning how to speak like them while at the same time living in an isolated monolingual nation. The Japanese government struggles with appropriate strategies on English education curriculum, leaving considerable room for improvement in the education system. Without revising the current education plan, English will remain a weakness for Japan.
This paper discusses the conflict between language policy and actual practice regarding loanword use in Japan. Localized appropriation of foreign words is nothing new to Japanese history; nevertheless, the Japanese government deems the current influx of loanwords to be “problematic”. A 2007 report by the National Institute for Japanese Language (NIJLA), commissioned by the government, finds that numerous loanwords that appear in public discourse are not understood by the average Japanese person. NIJLA suggested that the most commonly non-understood foreign-language loanwords should be replaced with native Japanese or Sino-Japanese paraphrases instead. Despite the fact that it is the government that first “problematized” this situation, and one of its own institutions that has suggested the countermeasure, my comparative examination of loanword use in public resources reveals that it is primarily government administrators who introduce new loanwords, legitimize them, and treat them as established discourse. I argue that this apparent discrepancy is a conflict between two different forms of language ideology – NIJLA’s (as well as the government’s) essentialist notion of ‘democratic language’ versus actual language use, including the very ‘third space’ language practices of government officials that have arisen within the contexts of the transnational discourse of globalization and internationalism.
This paper interrogates the formation and the representation of the English-speaking subject in modern Korea. Who speaks English in modern Korea and why? The paper offers a literary-historical sketch of representative modern Korean subjects in both Korean and Korean American literature. These subjects, I suggest, open up a troubled history of Korean imaginaries of the English language. Whereas English first appears as a marker of colonial modernity, class privilege, and social striving in early twentieth-century Korean literature, it quickly turns into a much more ambivalent and compromising sign of political and national dispossession in the literature of the Korean War. The evolution of the representative English-speaking Korean subject from the male colonial subject to the female ‘yanggongju’ (western princess) who serves the American military personnel stationed in Korea demonstrates that, in the Korean literary imagination, English has always been deeply connected to national and collective trauma and dispossession, even as it continues to perform as a sign of globalized, elite identity. Recently, we have seen the transnational adoptee emerge in Korean American literature as a prismatic figure embodying, in particularly painful and ironic form, the contradictory identifications demanded by English-language use in contemporary Korea.
English is deeply embedded within recent neoliberal projects of social reformation in South Korea, becoming a central topic of contention in the controversial educational reforms of the Lee Myung-bak regime (2008–2012). It figured prominently in various changes to the Korean education system pursued by the Lee administration under the name of greater competitiveness, such as increasing English immersion instruction in public schools and opening greater number of special purpose high schools where English language skills are highlighted. Lee’s policies on the one hand aimed to cater to middle-class parents’ desire for better educational opportunities that drive the Korean education fever; but on the other hand, they also fueled that very desire by inserting English into a neoliberal social order and imbuing it with cultural significance. Here, the indexical nature of language – how “good English” comes to be interpreted as embodied evidence of not only one’s educational attainment but also one’s previous transnational trajectories, thus positioning the speaker as an experienced cosmopolitan well prepared for “global competition” – plays a central role, as it naturalizes and justifies the classed nature of neoliberal projects despite continued contestation and debate.