Foreign language dependency
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By Kyung Moon Hwang
Recently I happened to watch a sports program showing a video clip of the pre-game bunting competition for the Korean baseball All-Star Game.
What caught my eye immediately was the huge target laid down on the field with very large promotional writing that read, “2016 Tire Bank KBO All-Star Game” and “Bunt King,” and nothing else. That is, there was no lettering in the Korean language; in fact an uninformed viewer would have little reason to know where this event was being held.
Many commentators over the years have complained about South Koreans’ preoccupation with English, but often to bemoan their inability to master the language or to dedicate themselves to it. Perhaps this is the reason for the over-compensation that one finds almost everywhere in South Korean public life, such as television commercials that include English in some form and end with an affected native English voice-over of the product or slogan, as if to provide supreme authenticity.
Just as comical are awkward constructions (“Konglish” is the term for these creations) in menu items or signs, as well as strained efforts to insert the most exotic or esoteric English words and terms. A case in point: the Korean baseball team “SK Wyverns.” I had to look up the definition of wyvern (a kind of dragon, it turns out).
What appears as slavish devotion to a foreign language, though, is nothing new in Korea. We need only to be reminded of the 1,500 years of Chinese writing’s dominance on the peninsula since ancient times, even though the Korean language is about as different from Chinese as it is from English.
Granted, there were attempts to adapt Chinese ideographs to spoken Korean, one of which was Idu, a writing system in which individual Chinese characters stood for specific Korean syllables. Idu remained in use, at least in bureaucratic documents, up to the early 20th century, but of course it was not suitable for non-specialists.
And here we come to perhaps the most important reason behind the long domination of literary Chinese in Korean history: its utility as a status marker and cultural instrument of the ruling classes. Even after the 15th-century invention of the now-celebrated Korean alphabet, which perfectly expressed the Korean language, the alphabet remained unused and un-loved by the government and ruling elite.
Thankfully the alphabet’s extraordinary functionality was exploited and developed by women and other non-elites over the course of the Joseon era, before eventually foreign missionaries, ironically, and Korean reformers at the turn of the 20th century established the alphabet’s centrality in public life.
But this came four centuries too late. Imagine the scale of social and cultural advancement that could have arisen had Korean elites embraced the alphabet upon its promulgation in the 1400s. They seemed more interested, however, in strengthening the connection between cultural elitism, represented by literary Chinese, with social and political exclusivity, regardless of how absurdly this bound them, and the country as a whole, to an inaccessible writing system.
By the time most educated Koreans came around to this reality in the early 20th century, the Japanese were taking over the country, and thereafter Japanese took the place of Chinese in becoming the written standard for political and cultural authority.
Unlike during the premodern era, however, this was much more a product of foreign coercion, so not surprisingly, after liberation in 1945 Koreans abolished the public appearance of Japanese and promoted use of the Korean alphabet, though to different degrees in the South and North.
In South Korea, the ensuing era of American political and cultural influence, a product of military and economic dependence on the United States, brought with it the increasing use of English in public life and the education system as a replacement of Japanese. Naturally, English became even more associated with social prestige and, as was the case in many other countries, the de facto universal language through which to connect with the wider world.
Japanese influence, however, remained strong among South Korean elites beneath the surface and behind the scenes. Popular cultural forms, such as television broadcasting, routinely and almost mechanically copied Japanese models, even as Japanese cultural products remained restricted in South Korea until the dawn of the new century.
A prime example of this comes from the Korean Baseball Organization (KBO), whose naming practices followed an odd mixture of two foreign examples, thus reinforcing an embarrassing double-dependence.
Since its founding in the early 1980s, the league’s teams have directly applied the Japanese model, which had resulted from Japan’s own dependence on the United States, by using the ownership company’s name combined with a nickname in English, such as the LG Twins (Seoul) or the Samsung Lions (Daegu). This paved the way toward something like the SK Wyverns.
Are Korean names and words so devalued that South Korean baseball teams must employ the Japanese example of using English nicknames? I’m certainly not in favor of going all nationalistic with this kind of thing, and the use of English in public life serves an important function.
But I hope that South Koreans can thoughtfully reconsider their various obsessions with English, which I believe are tied to unhelpful attitudes concerning social status and prestige. Perhaps they can start with baseball, which is very much a native sport now, indeed much more popular in South Korea than in the U.S.
Kyung Moon Hwang is professor in the Departments of History and East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Southern California. He is the author of “A History of Korea ― An Episodic Narrative” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). The Korean translation was published as 황경문, “맥락으로 읽는 새로운 한국사” (21세기 북스, 2011).