User:Courtneyleey/Konglish

English is also found in in the physical domains of the main streets, restaurants, sand shopping areas in Seoul and the rest of South Korea. Sociolinguistically, South Koreans would use English to represent luxury, youth, sophistication, and modernity

Category[ edit]
Konglish is relatively understudied and also varied in definition across individuals. However, some experts would agree that its formation parallels that of pidgins and creoles, but can't be defined as those categories because it is not yet its own category of English, but rather a subcategory of Korean that is conceptualized in the form of English words and phrases integrated with the Korean language.

Although Konglish is ambiguous in its category of linguistics, it is similar to the definition of Platt's "New Englishes", which is distinguished from erroneous or temporary forms of English. Konglish aligns with the standards of "New Englishes": developed through the education system, developed in an area where English is not the native language spoken by most of the population, used for a range of functions among the speakers, and has been localized by by adopting some language feature of its own like intonation patterns and expressions.

Laterals[ edit]
Many Koreans who immigrate to the United States and learn English have a distinct Korean-English variation, especially in early stages of acquisition. One reason this is so is due to distinct laterals between English and Korean languages, which affects the articulatory and acoustic characteristics of the languages. American English is often described as having "dark" variants, which involves a primary Alveolar contact gesture as well as a secondary dorsal retraction gesture. In most cases, English in America is spoken with very few anterior contact in the mouth, and instead uses the narrowed upper pharyngeal area with a retracted tongue dorsum. The Korean lateral on the other hand is considered to be "light" in its acoustic and articulatory characteristics. The two gestures that make up the Korean lateral include tongue tip closure and Palatalization (phonetics), which involves the raising of the tongue body.

According to the Speech Learning Model, learning a second language is easier in later stages of acquisition for laterals that are more different than similar because one can recognize the differences in speech sounds more clearly. This is true for Koreans learning English, as they use distinct articulatory tongue shapes, using a low tongue body and a heavily retracted tongue dorsum for their English word-final lateral, similar to native English speakers.

In loanwords used in Konglish, the dark English lateral is often mapped onto the loanwords Koreans use, showing that Koreans see these loanwords as separate from purely Korean, even though it is used in everyday life.

There have also been debates on whether embracing English as another national language in Korea would be harmful to the country as it could bring destruction to South Korea's national identity. In order to embrace the importance of learning English for globalism as well as protect Korea's own language and identity, many Korean institutions encouraged the government to adopt English as a public language instead of an official language for cultural flexibility and familiarity with English.