Joseph Sung-Yul Park

The local construction of a global language : ideologies of English in South Korea

The book investigates how the hegemony of English in South Korea is constructed through the mediation of language ideologies. Based on an innovative analysis of metalinguistic discourse in language policy debates, cross-linguistic humor, television shows, and face-to-face interaction, it cogently tells the story of how the complex meaning of English as a global language emerges through local discourse.

The Promise of English: Linguistic Capital and the Neoliberal Worker in the South Korean Job Market.

Abstract English is often assumed to be a key to material success and social inclusion, and this belief commonly works to justify the global dominance of English, glossing over and rationalizing broader social inequalities. This paper extends the discussion of this fallacy of ‘the promise of English’ to the domain of the South Korean job market, where skills in the English language play a major role in determining ones access to white-collar jobs. Since the 1990s, different modes of English language testing have emerged as popular means for evaluating job applicants for Korean corporations, constantly upgrading the criteria for ‘good English’. Through a discussion of how such changes are linked with the conception of self in the neoliberal workplace and how evaluation of linguistic competence is always a matter of social and ideological interpretation, this paper demonstrates why, in the Korean job market, the fulfillment of the promise of English is constantly deferred.

Markets of English : Linguistic Capital and Language Policy in a Globalizing World

1. Introduction 2. The Three Circles Model: A Market-Theoretic Perspective 3. Performativity and Appropriation: English in Autonomous and Unified Markets 4. Is There a Market for English as a Lingua Franca? 5. English as Commodity: The Ideological Bases of Supply and Demand 6. English as Capital: The Logic of Conversion 7. Managing the Linguistic Market: Possible Policy Responses 8. Conclusion

Introduction; Public transcripts: Entextualization and linguistic representation in institutional contextsx

Abstract The articles in this special issue argue that entextualization—the process by which circulable texts are produced by extracting discourse from its original context and reifying it as a bounded object—is an indispensable mechanism for the construction of institutional authority. More specifically, they demonstrate that one particular mode of entextualization, that involving the inscription of speech into writing, plays an especially important role in modern institutions, as the transfixing power of the written record endows the institution with an enormous advantage in presenting itself as an authoritative voice that can define, describe, and discipline its subjects. The contributors to this special issue illustrate the role of entextualization in the consolidation of institutional power through the critical analysis of linguistic representation within three key institutions—the law, the media, and the academy—in a variety of languages and cultures in North America, Europe, and Asia.

Metadiscursive regimes of diversity in a multinational corporation

Informed by recent work on the commodification of language and identity, this article offers a critique of the neoliberal corporate discourse of “diversity management,” in which the diversity of the workforce is conceived as a resource for maximizing profit. Through a close analysis of the language ideologies deployed in an interaction between three mid-level managers at a multinational corporation and a researcher, this article shows how the discourse of diversity management, constituting a metadiscursive regime, works to rationalize and justify the inequalities of the global workplace through the specific ways in which older and newer discourses of language and identity are juxtaposed. The findings emphasize how sociolinguistic research may contribute to a deeper understanding of the conditions of work in the new economy by identifying language as an indispensable part of the mechanism that sustains processes of control. (Metadiscursive regime, diversity management, neoliberalism, work, language ideology) *

Researching language and neoliberalism

ABSTRACT This special issue aims to develop a research agenda that brings language to the centre of our inquiry and critique of neoliberalism. Based on empirical case studies from across diverse contexts in Europe, North America, and East Asia, contributors to this special issue address two issues: (1) What can be said about the nature of neoliberalism when we approach it from the perspective of language as social and political process? (2) How does language learning and teaching, increasingly subject to the logic of the market, not only reflect neoliberal social transformations but also reinforce them? Together, the contributions to the special issue suggest new directions of research that will help establish language as an important key for understanding the shifting political economy of our time.

Language as pure potential

ABSTRACT Language occupies a crucial position in neoliberalism, due to the reimagination of language as commodified skill. This paper studies the role of language ideology in this transformation by identifying a particular ideology that facilitates this process, namely the ideology which views language as pure potential. Neoliberalism treats language as a neutral and abstract tool for communication that can convey information in a transparent, unadulterated way. Under this view, language is a pure medium of potentiality, which can realize any communicative goal that the speaker may want to achieve – thus in turn, a key for unlocking the hidden potential of the individual. For instance, a global language such as English supposedly allows its speaker to move beyond the constraints of her culture and community, reaching many people and traversing multiple markets, no longer stifled by the boundaries imposed by essentialized identity. By obscuring the embeddedness of language in social context, this ideology rationalizes endless investment in language learning, representing the language learner as a responsible neoliberal subject engaging in perpetual self-development. As an illustration of this process, this paper outlines how the ideology of language as pure potential contributes to the hegemonic status of English in South Koreas neoliberal transformation.

Commentary: Mobility, contexts, and the chronotope

Comments on a special issue on chronotopic phenomena in multilingual discourse online and offline.

Structures of Feeling in Unequal Englishes

Inequalities involving English have been a subject of much critical scrutiny. The multiple dimensions of this inequality—the greater value attributed to ‘standard’ varieties of English over other varieties; the dominance English exerts over other languages as a ‘global language’; and the consequences of social inequality that derive from such unequal evaluations—have indeed been key topics for sociolinguistic and applied linguistic research. In this chapter, I aim to draw attention to how dimensions of subjectivity rooted in lived experiences may contribute to such inequalities of English. I propose that addressing and contesting inequalities of English requires politicization of seemingly personal and mundane feelings regarding English in everyday life, as it is such aspects of subjectivity through which more enduring effects of unequal Englishes are reproduced and naturalized. Through an account of how anxieties about English in Korea are rooted in multiple structures of inequalities, I argue that finding ways to articulate and reflect upon such insecurities becomes an important way of making visible the mechanisms of unequal Englishes and securing political space for transforming the meaning of English.

Linguistic Baptism and the Disintegration of ELF

Abstract There is growing recognition that language cannot be seen as a pregiven system that correlates with and simply manifests itself in social context, but as a form of social practice. However, this perspective has not yet made a serious impact on applied linguistic research, where dominant modern ideologies of language that tend to conceive of language as an entity with clear boundaries and autonomous structure still prevail. We argue that this problem reflects a general lack of critical reflection on the fundamental assumptions of the discipline, and make this point via a review of some of the recent work on English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). In particular, we focus on a direction in research in which increasing effort is put into identifying and describing distinct ELFs within specific communities or domains, leading to a proliferation of ELFs, each of which can in turn be characterized in terms of a distinct set of formal linguistic features. We analyze the problems with identifying such “downscaled ELFs”, considering this research practice as an act of “linguistic baptism”, and discuss how it constitutes an uncritical appropriation of dominant metadiscursive regimes, rather than a careful engagement with them. In doing so, we call for a more serious consideration of metadiscursive regimes and the fundamental assumptions about language inherent in them.