Language ideology and social class in Korean society

Abstract

As global social interactions grow, the linguistic competence to communicate beyond national boundaries has become a significant consideration in individual achievement. The social transformation driven by the logic of the global interactions has repositioned English as a commodifiable object for obtaining privilege and prestige. However, extensive scholarship on elites, education, and inequality from a sociolinguistic perspective has focused on the disadvantage of the marginalized class. This study sheds light on how language elitism and social class recur and relate to language ideologies in Korean society by exploring the motivation to learn English among adolescents from families with different socioeconomic status. This study employs both quantitative and qualitative data. This study reveals that the adolescents have different meanings of globalization and different imagined communities because of their different exposure to English.