54 Heritage Language Journal, 6(2)
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Korean Heritage Language Maintenance and Language Ideology
Mihyon Jeon, York University

Abstract
This paper explores ways in which language ideology is linked to maintenance of Korean
as a heritage language by Koreans in America. The data for this ethnographic study come
from three separate sources: 1) a Korean language program at an American university; 2)
a community-based ESL program for Korean seniors; and 3) a recently immigrated
Korean family. Data collection methods include participant observation; informal
conversations with the participants; in-depth interviews; and on-site document analysis.
Through regular and sustained interaction with participants in the three research sites
over a period of three years, the findings provide insights into ways in which the
participants’ attitudes toward language learning and maintenance are continuously shaped
and revised based on their life circumstances. This paper describes each participant’s
language attitudes as fluid entities operating on a continuum of assimilationist ideologies
on the one end and pluralist ideologies on the other.

Introduction
This paper focuses on language ideologies of Korean immigrants and how they are
related to language learning and maintenance practices. In recent decades, scholarly
interest on patterns of language loss and maintenance among immigrant groups has
steadily grown (e.g., Extra & Verhoeven, 1993; Ferguson & Brice-Heath, 1981; Fishman,
1989, 1991; McKay & Wong, 1998). The most commonly observed pattern in the United
States is a three-generational language shift from the immigrant minority language to the
dominant language of the host society (Fishman, 1991). For instance, the first generation
speaks the native language, while the bilingual second generation comes between the
native-language-speaking first generation and the majority-language-speaking third
generation. However, language minority groups increasingly experience a complete
language shift within two generations (Wiley, 2001). This shift creates problems for
inter-generational communication as parents, grandparents, and children do not
understand each other. Wong Fillmore argues that “in recent years, languages other than
English have been placed in greater jeopardy than ever before in the United States”
(2003, p. 9).

The Korean language is no exception to this pattern of rapid language shift. A number of
studies have documented an accelerated shift to English in Korean immigrant families
(Cho & Krashen, 1998; Shin, 2005). Previous research on language use patterns of
Korean immigrants shows that first-generation Korean immigrants speak almost
exclusively Korean at home and at work, while most second-generation Korean
Americans use mostly English (Hurh & Kim, 1984; Min, 2000). Korean Americans are
among the more recent immigrant groups to enter the U.S., the majority having arrived
after the passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965. In 2000, over one
million Koreans were living in the U.S. according to the U.S. Census. Despite the number

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55 Heritage Language Journal, 6(2)
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of Korean immigrants, there are still many untold stories about their lives and the process
of heritage language maintenance (but see Jo, 2002; Lee, 2002; Shin, 2005). One area of
interest that has received insufficient attention in considering heritage language
maintenance is the concept of language ideologies (Fine & Sandstrom, 1993; Gonzáles,
2003; Lo Bianco, 2003; Silverstein, 1979). This study seeks to achieve a better
understanding of the relationship between language ideologies and heritage language
maintenance of Korean immigrants in the U.S. I first turn to a definition of language
ideology.

Language Ideology Defined
Silverstein defined language ideologies as “sets of beliefs about language articulated by
users as a rationalization or justification of perceived structure and use” (1979, p. 173).
This definition is particularly useful for the current study in that it offers a framework for
understanding the beliefs of Korean immigrant parents and children about English and
Korean and how they function in their justification of the use of English and Korean in
their homes. I also adopt an interactionist orientation on ideologies from a sociological
framework which conceptualizes ideologies as relational and behavioral (Fine &
Sandstrom 1993). Ideologies are relational in that they are not simply held by individuals,
but are presented to and shared with others. Ideological beliefs guide “people’s
conceptions of and actions in the social and political realm” (Fine & Sandstrom 1993, p.
24, emphasis added). In other words, people not only embrace ideologies but also act
them out. Fine and Sandstrom (1993) argue that the enactment of ideologies depends on
the resources available to people. Thus, to understand the relationship between heritage
language maintenance and language ideology in the language education practices of
Korean immigrant families, I put forth a conceptualization of language ideology as a set
of justifications for using one language over others in varying circumstances.

Lo Bianco (2003) argues that heritage language maintenance through inter-generational
transmission of heritage languages is “clearly affected by language ideologies as they
interact with the specific circumstances and prospects of HL acquisition, maintenance,
and re-acquisition” (p. 4). He further urges that:

We need to understand the ways in which some ideologies become
hegemonic, or sustain that status, and how ideologies of language operate
in specific contexts, differently or similarly for different languages. A key
question concerns how language-specific ideologies, or specific linguistic
cultures (Schiffman, 1996) relating to particular languages, affect practice
in our schools and universities and how these in turn impact on the
learning, loss, re-acquisition, literacy elaboration, or community-
appropriate proficiency of HLs in mainstream institutions. (2003, p. 4)

The current study addresses the following research questions: what are the language
ideologies adopted by Korean immigrants? How does the enactment of these language
ideologies operate in various familial and institutional settings?

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56 Heritage Language Journal, 6(2)
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Research Sites and Participants
The data for this study is drawn from a three-year ethnographic investigation of the
relationship between language use and attitudes by Koreans in America in several
institutional and familial settings. I have chosen three research sites to obtain a multi-
generational view of the language ideologies circulating in the Korean American
community. The first site, an undergraduate Korean language program, was selected to
explore second- and 1.5- generation immigrant children’s experiences in and motivations
for learning their heritage language in college. The second site, an adult ESL program,
provides information on first-generation Korean immigrants’ experiences in learning
English. The third site, the home of a Korean American family, offers a trans-
generational look at language use and attitude in a non-institutional setting. In the
following, I describe each of the three research sites in detail.

First site: A Korean language program at a University
I taught Korean at this site for four hours a week over three academic years (September
2000 - May 2003). The entire program served about 110 students, over 90% of whom
were second- or 1.5-generation Korean Americans. Second-generation Korean Americans
are defined as those who are born in the United States to first-generation Korean
immigrant parents. “1.5-generation” Korean Americans were born in Korea and
immigrated to the U.S. during childhood. Except for two 1.5-generation immigrants who
came to the U.S. at the ages of five and six, all other participants were second-generation
Korean Americans. Over the course of three years, thirty-three Korean American students
participated in my interview study. In this paper, I discuss the findings from the
interviews of nine of the thirty-three Korean American students who participated from
this research site. Table 1 summarizes the demographic information of the ten
participants, including their age at the beginning of the study, age at arrival in the U.S.,
and proficiency in Korean as measured by their placement in the program. In addition to
formal interviews, I carried out participant observation as the instructor of the Korean
language classes during the three years I taught in the program. I looked for patterns of
language use and attitude and was able to obtain a fairly accurate picture of their abilities
in Korean. In the third year of data collection, I conducted participant observation in an
intermediate-level Korean course taught by another instructor. Five of the ten students in
this class had taken my Korean classes the previous year.

Table 1: Participants at the University Korean Language Program
Name1
Age
Age at Arrival
Korean
Interview Date
Proficiency
Korean 101
Mike
19
Born in the U.S.
3/15/2001
(2000-2001)
Korean 101
Lily
19
Born in the U.S.
11/4/2000
(2000-2001)
Korean 101
Joseph
19
Born in the U.S.
11/6/2000
(2000-2001)

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57 Heritage Language Journal, 6(2)
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Korean 101
Tom
19
Born in the U.S.
9/27/2000
(2000-2001)
Korean 101
Dan
20 6
11/2/2000, 11/15/2000
(2000-2001)
Korean 101
Jane
18
Born in the U.S.
11/8/2000
(2000-2001)
Korean 101
Jennifer
18
Born in the U.S.
10/5/2000
(2000-2001)
Korean 101
David
21 5
2/13/2002
(2001-2002)
Korean 101
Edward
18
Born in the U.S.
9/19/2002
(2002-2003)
Korean 202
Austin
20
Born in the U.S.
11/6/2002
(2002-2003)

An interview ranging from forty-five minutes to one hour long was conducted with each
participant. The interviews sought to elicit information on the participants’ language use
patterns in different domains, language learning histories, and attitudes towards English
and Korean. The participants were asked to write essays on what motivated them to learn
Korean in college and on their progress in Korean. These essays further supplemented the
interview and participant observation data.

Second site: A Community-Based Adult ESL program for Korean American seniors
The adult ESL program was offered at a Korean American community center in
Philadelphia. With a few exceptions, the ESL students were first-generation Korean
immigrants over sixty years old and female. Table 2 summarizes the demographic
information of ten senior participants who are discussed in this paper, including their age
at the beginning of the study, length of residence in the U.S., education, and proficiency
in English. The class was offered during the daytime, which prevented working
immigrants from attending the class. Some of the seniors had been taking this class for as
long as ten years; the ESL program not only fulfilled their language learning needs but
also their social needs. The seniors often met with their friends at the community center
and socialized during and after class. In May, 2001, I started working as a teaching
assistant in the ESL program, helping the course instructor, Mrs. Lee, and interacting
with the adult students. Then from February to June 2003, I taught a citizenship class in
this program to help some of the seniors prepare for their U.S. citizenship interviews.
Over two years, I met with some seniors in their homes and outside of the classroom and
conducted interviews with twenty-five of them. The interviews were thirty minutes to one
hour long and were about their language use patterns, language learning histories, English
language learning practice, and attitudes toward English and Korean.

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58 Heritage Language Journal, 6(2)
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Table 2: Participants at the Community-based Adult ESL Program
Name
Age
Length of
Education
English
Interview
Residence
Proficiency
Date
Mr. Shin
61 9
years
Secondary
Minimal 10/03/02
Mrs. Huh
69 17
years Primary Minimal 11-02-02
Mrs. Yu
62 3
years
Secondary
Minimal 8/18/02
10-3-02
Mrs. Kim
60 14
years Primary Minimal 10-10-02
Mrs. Oh
65 15
years College Minimal 10/25/02
Mr. Lee
68 14
years College Minimal 11/4/2001
Mrs. Lee
70 15
years Primary Minimal 10/11/2002
Mrs. Yun
62 10
years Secondary
Minimal 10/25/2002
Mr. Jee
68 14
years College Intermediate
9/27/2002
10/25/2002
Mr. Park
79 18
year
College Minimal 11/1/2002

Third site: A Korean American Home
The third research site was the home of a Korean immigrant family. I spent time with the
Park family from December 2001 to June 2002 when I taught the two Park children,
Unmi and Youngsu, at their home three hours per week. I first got to know Mrs. Park in
the adult ESL class mentioned above in December of 2001. The Parks emigrated from
Korea to the United States in May 2001 and were adjusting to life in a new country. Both
Mr. Park and Mrs. Park were in their mid-forties, with minimal English proficiency.
Before coming to the U.S., Mr. Park had had a white-collar job at a company and Mrs.
Park was a music instructor. When I first met the family, both Mr. and Mrs. Park were
unemployed. But Mrs. Park started working as a part-time tailor at a Korean-owned dry
cleaner soon after I started tutoring her children, and a few months later Mr. Park began
working as a clerk at a convenience store owned by non-Koreans. His decision to work at
this store was motivated by a desire to interact solely with non-Koreans to practice his
English. As college-educated former professionals, Mr. and Mrs. Park have both
experienced a downward shift in their employment in the U.S. due mainly to their weak
command of English (Hurh, 1998; Shin, 2005).

The two Park children, Unmi and Youngsu, were in grades eight and six, respectively.
Unmi, an outgoing teenage girl, liked her new school, while Youngsu, her younger
brother, often said that he disliked the new school and missed his school in Korea. I
recorded field notes of my interaction with the family every time I was at their house. I
paid particular attention to home literacy practices, language use patterns, and language

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attitudes. The Park family is by no means representative of all Korean American families.
However, my interaction with them provided me with first-hand information on ways in
which language ideologies within a family were resonant with what was reported by the
college students and the ESL seniors.

Research Methodology
The data collection methods included participant observation, informal conversations
with the participants, interviews, and site document review. Whenever possible, I
recorded detailed field notes of my observations. Class meetings and tutoring sessions
were audio-recorded. At the Korean language program, 86 two-hour long class meetings
were recorded from September 26, 2000 to April 15, 2003. At the adult ESL program, 48
class meetings were recorded from December 7, 2001 to May 9, 2003. With Unmi and
Youngsu, 23 one and a half-hour long tutoring sessions were recorded from January 18,
2002 to June 10, 2002. The interviews were conducted in the language the interviewees
felt most comfortable using. I spoke Korean with the ESL seniors and the Parks and a
mixture of Korean and English to interview my students in the Korean language program.
All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. During my initial review of the data,
I developed tentative categories and themes related to language ideology found in the
data. I then highlighted the tentative categories in my field notes, in the transcripts of the
interviews and in-class recordings, and site documents. I then sorted the themes across
the three sites to understand the relationships among the categories.

Language Ideologies in Circulation
Language ideologies operating in the Korean American community can be gauged on a
continuum of assimilationist ideologies on one end and pluralist ideologies on the other.
Most immigrants’ language ideologies seem to shift on this continuum as their life
circumstances change. In this section, I will describe assimilationist language ideologies
first, and then move onto pluralist ideologies next. I shall argue that most people espouse
an ideology that falls somewhere in between the opposite poles of the continuum.

Assimilationist language ideologies
At the macro-societal level, assimilationist ideologies may include various strains of
xenophobia and “a crusade to ‘Americanize’ the new immigrants” (Schmid, 2000). Wiley
and Wright (2004) note that lack of tolerance of languages other than English and
antagonism toward bilingual education are as apparent as they have ever been. Recently,
the English-Only movement has spawned various anti-bilingual measures including
ballot initiatives to ban bilingual education in a number of states including California,
Arizona, and Massachusetts and Official English statutes in some twenty states (Lo
Bianco, 2004). At the individual level, assimilationist ideologies may stem from a
personal desire to succeed socially and academically.

The Park family provides an example of the assimilationist end of the language ideology
continuum. The following passage is excerpted from my field notes on March 15, 2002.
Earlier that day, Mr. Park had scolded Youngsu for bringing his uneaten snack back
home. It turned out that Youngsu had brought the snack to school on the wrong day

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because he did not understand his teacher’s direction. Mr. Park blamed Youngsu for
failing to understand a simple direction in English. The following vignette shows Mrs.
Park’s reaction to her husband’s angry response:

"I am terribly busy. I wish he would help me, but he only blames the
children. I feel less affectionate toward him whenever he yells at them. It
takes some time to speak English well. But he just blames the children
because they don’t speak English well yet. I am worried that my kids
might become insane because of their father." (Translated from Korean)

Knowing that language learning takes time, Mrs. Park was frustrated that her husband
had unrealistic expectations for the children to learn English quickly. She told me that she
was trying to arrange for Youngsu to live with native-English speaking Americans to
improve his English. She described her friend’s son who learned to speak English well
from living with his English teacher. Then Unmi interrupted her mother and said in an
urgent tone of voice, “Send me, too. Send me, too. People say that if you come to the
United States after 15 years of age, you can’t fix your Korean accent. I am now 15. Send
me, too.” Driven by parental pressure and a desire to learn English and speak it without
an accent, Unmi was willing to leave her family. It should be mentioned that tens of
thousands of parents in Korea send their children abroad to English-speaking countries to
have them educated in English (Shin, 2006). This is largely due to the status of English as
“a global language” (Kachru, 1988; McArthur, 1987; Crystal, 1997) and the importance
of English in education and employment. However, it is much less common for Korean
immigrants who are already living in America to break up their family so that their
children can stay at an English-speaking home. This rather drastic measure is an
indication of the sense of pressure the family feels to learn English.

To Mr. Park, the use of Korean detracts from the overall goal of learning English. He
adopted a policy to eliminate written materials in Korean from his home. One time when
I went to a Korean grocery store with Mrs. Park, we passed by a pile of Korean weekly
newspapers. I picked up a copy and thought Mrs. Park would, too. But she explained that
her husband had ordered her not to bring home any newspapers in Korean. In fact, Mr.
Park did not allow her to bring home anything in Korean, insisting that everyone in the
family needed to learn English and become American. Youngsu also said that his father
did not allow him to watch television programs in Korean or listen to music with Korean
lyrics. When I asked him why, he answered that his father wanted him to learn English as
quickly as possible. Given that Mr. and Mrs. Park do not speak or read English very well,
Korean newspapers and TV programs are the only ways in which they can keep
themselves informed of current events anywhere in the world. They were making an
enormous personal sacrifice by eliminating Korean written materials and media from
their home.

It should be noted that Mr. Park’s behavior is probably influenced by the family’s status
as recent immigrants. Since their children came to the U.S. relatively late as teenagers,
Mr. and Mrs. Park know that there is not enough time for them to develop advanced

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English skills to enter reputable universities. Therefore, they may be willing to take
drastic measures to “close the gap” in their children’s English abilities. Rather than using
Korean to learn English, Mr. and Mrs. Park have made a conscious decision to make a
sharp break with it so that the children could be immersed in English. The children,
however, are aware of the consequences of focusing only on English. For example, Unmi
told me that her dream was to become a news broadcaster in Korea, but she did not
expect to since her Korean would not develop further. As radical as they may seem, cases
like the Park family are relatively rare in the Korean-American community.

The language learning histories of the participants in the university Korean language
program illustrate that the families of these students held similar, although much less
extreme, language ideologies to those of the Parks. Mike, a second-generation Korean
American, said that he had never learned Korean from his parents because they were
afraid that he would fall behind in school in America if he were learning two languages at
once. Mike added, “So all my life I’ve only spoken English with my parents.” His parents
had moved to the United States as graduate students in their mid-twenties. According to
Mike, their English, even with a Korean accent, was good enough to carry on
conversations solely in English. However, they did not feel more comfortable speaking
English than Korean. Mike's parents always asked him or his brother to speak in English
for them in public because they were ashamed of their Korean accent.

Lily, a second-generation Korean American, had a similar story. She recalls, “When I
was growing up, my parents were afraid that I would not learn English well enough. So
from the start, my parents began talking to me in English to ensure that I would master
the language and do well in school.” Joseph and Edward, both second-generation Korean
Americans, shared similar stories. Dan, a 1.5-generation Korean American, who came to
America at the age of six, recalled that his mother, a Korean language teacher at a Korean
heritage language school, ironically did not allow him to learn Korean because she
wanted him to learn English as quickly as possible. Dan was not given an opportunity to
learn Korean until he started college. All these students experienced strong parental
pressure to acquire English skills so they could be academically competitive.

Shin (2005) finds that language shift to English in Korean American families is in part
due to parents’ extreme concern about education, which is perceived to depend on perfect
development of English. Furthermore, many Korean immigrant parents chose to move to
the U.S. for children’s education, since access to higher education is much more
competitive in Korea than it is in the United States. Education as a main motivation to
emigrate makes Korean parents zealous about their children learning English – their
children’s failure to get into a good college turns their immigration to the U.S. into a
failure as well. Wong Fillmore (2003) argues that many immigrant parents choose to
stop speaking the heritage language because they do not want to be perceived as being
different from the mainstream population, and because educational policies emphasizing
children’s English development pressure parents to abandon their heritage language. Both
of these reasons are a reflection of assimilationist ideologies; immigrants are seen as
needing to be assimilated to U.S. mainstream society, and acquiring English at the cost of

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heritage languages is taken for granted. In addition, an English-only policy at home is
justified by immigrant parents’ belief that learning two or more languages confuses their
children, an assumption that Shin (2003) characterizes as one of the many “myths
surrounding bilingualism.”

Assimilationist language ideologies circulating in micro-level interactions are backed up
by the idea of English as the de facto language of the United States (Macedo, 1997). In
response to my question about which language is more important, Mr. Shin, one of the
seniors in the adult ESL class, answered “If you live here [the United States], the more
important language is of course English. You must speak English, because you need to
know the language of this place.” Mr. Shin’s use of the expressions, “of course” and
“must” indexes his language ideology that using English confers a legitimacy on its
speakers that other languages do not.

The first-generation immigrants in the adult ESL class seemed to equate English abilities
with Americanness. With only one exception, all the seniors whom I interviewed
answered that they did not consider themselves to be American, whether or not they had
U.S. citizenship. Mrs. Huh, the only senior who said that she considered herself an
American, justified her answer with her status as a U.S. citizen. When I asked the seniors
to explain why they did not consider themselves American, many of them answered,
“Because I cannot speak English.” To emphasize the importance of English in being
American, Mrs. Yu said, “How can you be American when you cannot speak the
language?” Here, Mrs. Yu used “the language” to refer to English. To the seniors,
English seems to be the only language that marks someone as American. These beliefs
are closely linked to macro-level English-Only ideologies and policies, as well as the
status of English as a global language.

Another example of an ideology favoring English is shown in an interview Mr. Shin, a
student in the adult ESL class. When I asked Mr. Shin which language he believed to be
more beautiful, he said “English” twice, then added, “English is the best language…. Yes,
yes, because English is the common language of the world. If you know English, you can
use it anywhere, but you cannot use Korean in foreign countries.” It is noteworthy that
my question about aesthetic qualities of Korean and English brought about a response
that focuses on the practicality of these languages.

Pluralist language ideologies
Many participants in this study espoused language ideologies towards the other end of the
continuum, which values both Korean and English. According to Schmid (2000), pluralist
language ideologies:

recognize and affirm the multilingual nature of the society, declare that
multiple languages (and ethnolinguistic groups) are national resources to
be nurtured as a collective asset, grant equal language rights to individuals
and/or groups to retain their “mother’s tongue,” and stipulate a policy goal

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of facilitating native language retention and maintenance, most commonly
through the educational system. (p. 60)

Most participants considered bilingualism to be better than monolingualism and to offer
additional benefits to the speaker. The university students of Korean and the adult ESL
students expressed the value of Korean in various domains in their lives such as family
and friendship as well as employment. For example, Mrs. Kim in the ESL program
emphasized the value of Korean in a story of a second-generation Korean American, the
son of her acquaintance, who lost his job at a Korean-owned company in the United
States because of his inability to speak Korean. She started the story, saying “If you can
speak not only English but also Korean, it is even better than speaking only English.”
Mr. Park shared Ms. Kim's view: “If 1.5- and second-generation Korean Americans can
speak both Korean and English, it is really beneficial for their future. But if they can
speak only English, it’s disadvantageous.”

Immigrant parents are motivated to raise their children to be bilingual in Korean and
English because they want to help their children develop healthy ethnic identities as
Korean Americans. Furthermore, as Korea becomes economically more influential in the
world, there is a growing recognition that knowledge of Korean provides economic and
practical benefits. Many ESL seniors emphasized the importance of Korean for their
grandchildren and expressed the desire that they be Korean American. Similarly, Cho
(2000) reported that second-generation Korean Americans who had developed Korean
language proficiency had a strong ethnic identity and displayed greater understanding and
knowledge of cultural values, ethics, and manners.

First-generation immigrant parents often send their 1.5- and second-generation children
to Korean heritage language schools, many of which are affiliated with Korean Protestant
churches (Min, 2000; You, 2005). A few of my college student participants recalled
attending Korean heritage language schools, and reported that they stopped going for a
number of reasons. One student reported that he was forced to attend such a school, but
was not motivated to learn Korean and eventually stopped attending.2 Another student
did not enjoy Korean school because of her teacher’s authoritarian and tedious teaching
style. Scheduling conflicts between their Korean school's weekend schedules and
extracurricular activities caused still others to withdraw. Finally, students usually do not
earn academic credit for Korean community school attendance, although a small number
of states allow public schools to that grant students academic credit.3

The presence of grandparents in the home greatly influences children’s exposure to
Korean. For example, Mrs. Oh, an ESL senior, took on an active role in teaching Korean
to her grandchildren, who she said now speak both English and Korean comfortably. Mrs.
Oh said, about her granddaughter, “When I visit her, she must speak with me only in
Korean. I refuse to listen to her unless she speaks in Korean. When I am with them, she
has to write [copy] one page of the Bible in Korean per day.”

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Document Outline

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