Sociolinguistic Futures between the UK and South Korea

Both South Korea and the United Kingdom have been home to significant developments in the social and cultural analysis of language over the past forty years. Under the collective umbrella of sociolinguistics, fields have expanded to include areas of critical discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, semiotics, dialectology, conversation analysis, linguistic ethnography, applied linguistics, and others. These fields cover a wide range of topics, from the microanalysis of conversation and interaction to the global spread of English as a skill tied to class ideologies. While sharing intellectual origins as well as topical interests, sociolinguists in the UK and South Korean have had little opportunity for institutional or research collaboration. This network project aims to build connections around topics that are increasingly relevant for both academic and public domains. This project will do so by focusing on the sociolinguistics of contemporary Korean and its transnational movements.

Now is an opportune time to build such a network for two reasons. First, the study of the Korean language has become hugely popular around the world, spread by interest in South Korean popular culture and media. This has led to huge growth in university enrolments in Korean language and Korean studies programmes, particularly in the UK. At the University of Sheffield, the Korean Studies program has grown from enrolling under five students enrolling per year to over seventy in the past ten years. Universities like SOAS, Edinburgh, Coventry, Manchester, Newcastle, and Central Lancashire have also seen a sharp rise in home student interest in Korean language and studies. Students receive high-level training in language as well as in academic areas of culture, society, history, and politics. Reflecting this growth, the South Korean government agencies have recently invested significant funding in the growth of Korean studies programmes in the UK.

Second, research in South Korean sociolinguistics has been at the forefront of addressing emerging topics in recent years. These include the globalization of English, the commodification of language as a skill, language and schooling, regional and ethnic stratification of linguistic varieties, and ideologies that link ethnicity, language, and prestige in complex ways. Furthermore, South Korea's highly urbanized, globally mobile, and digitally connected society portends a number of emerging trends in the future of sociolinguistic analysis. This context includes the rise of hybrid youth registers, language-linked migration across the global South, multimodal communication, anonymous digital platforms, and communities of translation. These areas have received popular attention in South Korea as well as some scholarship in Korean and English. With the spread of both digital technology and global capitalism, these trends will spread to more contexts globally, and knowledge from South Korean cases can begin to set the agenda for other areas and scholars.

These reasons suggest that new pathways of research and knowledge exchange between UK and South Korean scholars and institutions can have wide-ranging impact. The Sociolinguistic Futures network will not only aim to bring together researchers from the UK and South Korea who have not had opportunities to collaborate or share insights, but also establish pathways for students and early career researchers to pursue cross-cultural study, research, and mentoring opportunities. These pathways can lead to new transnational and transmedia research projects that continue to set agendas for sociolinguistic research in the coming decades.