Fragile bilinguals: rescaling "good" and "bad" South Korean bilinguals

Abstract

My dissertation explores how U.S.-based multilingual South Korean speakers of English and Korean negotiate their positions in the over-crowded and complex lingusitic market, and try to stake a claim to being legitimate bilinguals through the process of metapragmatic typification (Agha, 2007). First, I investigate how tensions between Koreanness (nationalism/tradition) and cosmopolitanism (national betrayal) are exercised and displayed through mediatized discourses. Using discourse analysis, I then analyze interactions among a group of transnational South Korean graduate students who attend a North American university. By analyzing naturally occurring data from their social meetings and computer-mediated conversations, I examine how they consume circulating language ideologies, and locate themselves through the selective production of ideological representations or language registers associated with certain models of personhood. In particular, I focus on the process of metapragmatic typification, which shows how participants discursively typify linguistic registers, linguistic practices and models of personhood as indexical emblems of ‘good/successful’ or ‘bad/failed’ bilinguals as an attempt to legitimize themselves. By analyzing both macro- and micro- contexts, my dissertation highlights how such tensions have been reconstructed and rescaled in society, and how individuals participate in the process of developing sense-making discourses (Heller & Duchêne, 2012) in order to secure their positions and marginalize ‘other’ English speakers (e.g., Agha, 2003; Inoue, 2006).

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