Sociolinguistic Futures between the UK and South Korea

在过去的四十年里，韩国和英国都在语言的社会和文化分析方面取得了重大进展。在社会语言学的集体保护伞下，领域已经扩展到包括批评话语分析，语言人类学，符号学，方言学，会话分析，语言民族志，应用语言学等领域。这些领域涵盖了广泛的主题，从对话和互动的微观分析到英语作为一种与阶级意识形态相关的技能的全球传播。虽然共享知识来源以及热门的兴趣，英国和韩国的社会语言学家很少有机会进行机构或研究合作。该网络项目旨在围绕与学术和公共领域日益相关的主题建立联系。该项目将通过关注当代韩国及其跨国运动的社会语言学来实现这一目标。现在是建立这样一个网络的合适时机，原因有两个。首先，韩国语的学习在世界各地非常受欢迎，对韩国流行文化和媒体的兴趣传播开来。这导致韩国语言和韩国研究课程的大学入学人数大幅增长，特别是在英国。在谢菲尔德大学，韩国研究项目在过去十年中从每年招收不到五名学生发展到每年招收七十多名学生。SOAS、爱丁堡、考文垂、曼彻斯特、纽卡斯尔和中央兰开夏等大学的学生对韩国语言和研究的兴趣也急剧上升。学生接受语言以及文化，社会，历史和政治学术领域的高水平培训。韩国政府机构最近对英国的韩国语研究项目的增长投入了大量资金，反映了这种增长。第二，韩国社会语言学研究近年来一直处于解决新兴课题的前沿。这些因素包括英语的全球化，语言作为一种技能的商品化，语言和学校教育，语言多样性的区域和种族分层，以及以复杂方式将种族，语言和声望联系起来的意识形态。此外，韩国的高度城市化，全球移动的和数字连接的社会预示着社会语言学分析的未来的一些新兴趋势。这一背景包括混合青年登记册的兴起、全球南方与语言有关的移徙、多模式通信、匿名数字平台和翻译社区。这些领域在韩国受到了广泛的关注，也有一些韩语和英语的奖学金。随着数字技术和全球资本主义的传播，这些趋势将在全球范围内传播到更多的背景下，来自韩国案例的知识可以开始为其他领域和学者设定议程。这些原因表明，英国和韩国学者和机构之间的研究和知识交流的新途径可以产生广泛的影响。社会语言学未来网络不仅旨在汇集来自英国和韩国的研究人员，他们没有机会合作或分享见解，而且还为学生和早期职业研究人员建立途径，以追求跨文化学习，研究和指导机会。这些途径可以导致新的跨国和跨媒体研究项目，继续为社会语言学研究在未来几十年的议程。

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.