“Multilingual islands in the monolingual sea”: Foreign languages in the South Korean linguistic landscape

Abstract

Abstract The article aims at analyzing data on the South Korean linguistic landscape, with a focus on multilingual practices and different dimensions of language use, sets of norms, and ideological constructs underling particular linguistic choices. It is based on the analysis of a data set of over 800 digital photos of various signs and advertisements as well as necessary metadata gathered in 2018–2020 in four different urban contexts. The data, on the one hand, reflect recent changes favoring multilingualism; on the other hand, they demonstrate pragmatic inequality of other languages than Korean in public use. This inequality, however, is represented differently in certain spatial urban contexts; while commodified English tends to function as a substitution for other foreign languages and as an emblem of “foreignness,” agentivity of new ethnically diverse speakers creates “multilingual islands,” and that process can at some point challenge the dominance of monolingual ideology.