DISCOURSES OF ENGLISH AS AN OFFICIAL LANGUAGE IN A MONOLINGUAL SOCIETY THE CASE OF SOUTH KOREA 英语论文.doc

PAGE  PAGE 44 YOO - DISCOURSES OF ENGLISH AS AN OFFICIAL LANGUAGE IN SOUTH KOREA Second Language Studies, 23(2), Spring 2005, pp. 1-44. DISCOURSES OF ENGLISH AS AN OFFICIAL LANGUAGE IN A MONOLINGUAL SOCIETY: THE CASE OF SOUTH KOREA Ok Kyoon Yoo Simwon Middle School INTRODUCTION With the advent of globalization, the emergence of new national and international orders has posed linguistic challenges at various levels. Three competing trends—homogenization, heterogenization, and hybridization—are reshaping language situations within and between nations. At a national level, in some Western multilingual countries, linguistic justice has been increasingly argued for by minority groups, whether indigenous or immigrant, against the centripetal forces of the ideology of ‘one nation one language’, as is clear in the recent English-only movement in the US. In the multilingual third world, many countries have been struggling to create linguistic identities out of their ethnic languages and former colonizers’ languages. On the other hand, at a global level, the phenomenal spread of English is considered by some to be a major threat to other ethnic languages in the world and by others to facilitate participation in international communications. In this context, South Korea has recently witnessed recurrent proposals for English as an Official Language (EOL) as a language policy for meeting the demands of globalization. In response, another competing force, nationalism, has formed strong reactions to these proposals, thereby opening up heated debates in the media and publications. Considering that South Korea is a ‘monolingual’ society, not a ‘multilingual one’, that enjoys a very high degree of congruity as a speech community (Coulmas, 1999) and that it is an Expanding Circle country (Kachru, 1989), where English is learned as a ‘foreign’ language, the proposal for EOL in South Korea is an extreme case that focuses only on the need for international communications without