Korean Language Use on the Rise Worldwide

The Chosun Ilbo posted an article this week boasting about how the number of people worldwide learning and studying Korean has been increasing. But of course the number of students worldwide studying Korean has dramatically increased over the last decade.  The same has to be true for the rest of the world's top languages as computers and emerging media makes studying foreign languages easier, more affortable, and more practical.

The Korean language is no longer restricted to the Korean people. The number of Korean language departments at universities in China rose from around 20 in 2004 to around 70 this year. There are more than 640 Korean language departments at universities around the world. 

Thanks to the popularity of Korean culture in Japan, 3,000 language schools or institutes teach Korean there. In Southeast Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East, there is a tremendous amount of interest in Korean culture and language.

Two things to note.  First, as China continues to develop, it will inevitably build more schools and universities and it is logical that they would also include language departments with one of its biggest regional trading partners.  Chinese people are not all of a sudden discovering the Korean language, they are merely developing a growing capacity for their people to study it.

Second, does the author really think it is because of the "popularity of Korean culture" that there are so many language schools in Japan?  A more reasonable explanation might be the extremely large population of Korean Zainichi.  They are also a strategic military ally and important regional business and trade partner.  I do not think KPOP, kimchi ice cream, and Hanbok fashion has really taken off in Japan and driven their young people to study Korean in recent years.

Since 1997, the U.S. Scholastic Aptitude Test has been available written in Korean and 4,176 students opted to take the test this year. There are 2,100 schools around the world that teach Hangeul, or written Korean, half of them in the United States.

More than a thousand schools in the United States teach Hangeul?  That is impressive.

The Test of Proficiency in Korean or TOPIK is administered twice a year to foreigners and Koreans living abroad whose first language is not Korean. For the next TOPIK administered on Saturday and Sunday in 97 areas in 20 countries, a record 93,173 people signed up. Including the 86,000 applicants who took the test in April, the total number of candidates rises to 180,000.

In 1997, the first year the TOPIK was offered, 2,274 people took the test. Twelve years later, the total number of applicants has grown almost 90-fold. The number of applicants grew 30 percent from last year alone.

Looking at the distribution of people who have applied this time, the largest group of 72 percent or 67,000 are Chinese. Japanese account for 6.4 percent, Taiwanese for 1.6 percent and Thais for 1 percent.

Among the reasons for the surge is the growing popularity of Korean culture, a rise in the number of foreign students wishing to study in Korea and the inroads Korean businesses are making overseas. Another reason is the requirement since 2007 for foreigners to pass a practical Korean-language test to be eligible to work in factories here.

Applicants taking the test in Korea are said to be mostly foreign manufacturing workers or women who married Korean men.

Bingo.  However, I say good for these brides and good for these manufacturing workers.  Learning Korean is not easy and I say anyone born in a foreign land who comes here and tries their hardest to learn this extremely challenging language deserves respect and admiration.

Linguist Suzanne Romaine has tabulated the total number of Korean speakers at 75 million, ranking 12th in the world. That excluded people in China and India who speak a dialect of Korean. If those people are included, the Korean language probably ranks 10th in the world, according to Korean scholars. In a UN evaluation in 2007 on the influence of different languages, Korean ranked ninth in the world.

Language is a valuable resource in boosting national competitiveness in this age of globalization and knowledge-based information. To boost the reach and influence of the language, the focus on a national level should be on developing a more systematic and efficient method of teaching Korean and disseminating it around the world.

Since deciding to pick up and move to Korea, I have purchased and tried several different kinds of Korea language books and programs.  I have tried books (both published in America and in Korea), audio cds, tv programs, internet websites, and language software.  I feel like I have made tremendous progress learning the language, but there is no identified "best" or "most efficient" way for international students to learn and study Korean.  I think it would be a fantastic idea if the government did more (I suppose I mean financially) to help foreigners living in Korea to learn the Korean language.