Last updated on August 16, 2024
(Published : Oct 14, 2014 – 20:53)
Thursday Oct. 9 was Hangeul Day. As happens every year, the media ran articles extolling the virtues of Hangeul and contemplating the possible “globalization” of Hangeul. This year marked the second anniversary of the restoration of Hangeul Day as a national holiday.
In 1991, Hangeul Day was taken off the list of national holidays and was celebrated as a national commemoration day that did not include a day off work or school. Encouraged by business interests, the government at the time thought that there were too many holidays in October, and decided to demote Hangeul Day.
Hangeul Day is a good time to reflect on the state of the Korean language, both inside and outside Korea. In thinking about a language, the concept of language vitality is a good place to start. Language vitality focuses on the health of the language as a medium of spoken and written expression across in all of areas of private and public life.
The world has 6,900 languages (the Bible, or parts of it, have been translated into 2,500 languages) and the overwhelming majority are losing vitality rapidly at the expense of a few dominant languages. English comes to mind first, but Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish all overwhelm smaller languages nearby or in former colonies. As languages of education and government, these languages turn smaller languages into private languages that gradual weaken over time.
Korean occupies an interesting place among the world’s languages. Though often considered part of the Altaic language family, Korean has no traceable connection to another language. A traceable connection comes from indigenous vocabulary, not word order or borrowed vocabulary. Word order, for example, can be similar by chance; Chinese and English are good examples of this. Korean is often considered a language isolate, which means that it is not related typologically to any other language.
Hangeul, which Koreans are justifiably proud of, is also isolating because no other language uses it as a writing system. Korean as used in South Korea permits the use of Chinese characters, but they are hard to find in everyday writing. North Korea is strictly Hangeul only and does not permit the use of Chinese characters.
With about 80 million speakers on the Korean Peninsula and around the globe, Korean is the 11th most spoken language in the world. This ranks about the same as South Korea’s GDP. For a language to remain vital, it needs a critical mass of speakers and it needs to be the dominant language of a geographical region or sovereign state. It also needs to have an active media and publishing industry. From this perspective, Korean is indeed a vital language. Korean is perhaps the 10th most vital language in the world after the six official languages of the U.N. (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish) and other important languages, such as German, Japanese, and Portuguese.
The most pressing problem facing Korean is its vitality as an academic language of research and technology. As universities in English-speaking countries have come to dominate scholarship, English has become the de facto language in an increasingly global market for scholarship. Korea has embraced globalism and the notion of a “global standard,” particularly since the economic crisis 1997. Today, Korean universities rank scholarship produced in English higher than that produced in Korean. Since the mid-2000s, Korean universities have turned to classes taught in English and, more recently, to hiring foreign professors as part of the “globalization push.”
The problem with this approach is that it devalues Korean as a language used to produce new knowledge. The act of ranking academic activity in English higher than Korean sends a powerful message that Korean doesn’t really count. That message, however it is sent, is the first step in the long process of undermining the vitality of a language. This is not what Korea wants.
To move forward, policymakers in Korea need to accept that 1990s globalism is dead. The Great Recession of 2008-9 stimulated a critical reevaluation of the globalist vision. Once policymakers dispense with the globalist vision, they will be able to see the obvious: Thinking and creativity in Koreans is best developed through the use of their native language. Implementing policies that reflect this will help Korean recover some of the vitality that is has lost in the globalist boom.