Ross King (academic)

Ross King (born February 25, 1961) is a Canadian linguist and Koreanist. He has been the head of the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia since July 2008.

Education
King first became interested in the Korean language during his second year of undergraduate studies. He first visited Korea in 1981, during the Gwangju Uprising, and learned Korean by talking with locals.

He has a Ph.D. in linguistics from Harvard University and has published books in both English and Korean.

Career
King is a researcher in Korean historical linguistics, Korean dialectology (especially Koryo-mar, the dialect of Koryo-saram), and literature in the Sinosphere. In 2022, he spent a year as a visiting scholar in Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea.

King is also an advocate for greater South Korean private and public investment on international language learning of Korean, in order to capitalize on and sustain the success of the Korean Wave. In 1999, he established the Korean Residential Language Camp in Minnesota, to encourage Korean language immersion. For his contributions to the development of international Korean language learning, he was given the Oesol Award, named for the Korean linguist Choe Hyeon-bae (whose art name was Oesol).

Personal life
According to a reporter from the Weekly Chosun, King speaks English, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean fluently. He is married to a Korean woman, whom he met at Harvard.