The Korean Language
The Korean language is an East Asian language spoken in both North and South Korea. It is one of the Korean languages and is officially and nationally spoken in these two republics. However, each country has standardized the official form to be used within the specific territories (Mente 44).
Korean, as a language, is considered in isolation, but it does have a few related dialects with which it can be grouped. This means that Korean is a member of a small family in the ancient languages in Northeast Asia (Mente 47).
The History of Modern Korea
The history of modern Korea dates back to Middle Korea, which also comes from Old Korea, which has its roots in Prehistoric Korea. Some linguistics such as Roy Andrew Miller, Samuel Martin, and William George Aston have proposed a relationship between Korean and Japonica languages (Mente 53). They suggested that they both belong to the Altaic family, but this proposition was later rejected by some linguistic specialists.
Japanese Attitude Towards the Korean Language
Japan and Korea have a history of bad blood between them, which boils down to the attitudes to the languages spoken in the two countries. Korean and Japanese are different languages but closely related, with several similarities like the grammar rules and some words that sound similar. Both languages contain vocabulary that descended from the Chinese language, but this does not mean that they are related to Chinese (Suguita, Sawaki and Haranda 537).
Japan and Korea have had influences on each other for a long time through culture, history, and language. However, the Japanese have a negative attitude towards the Korean language, with most of them thinking that the language is hard to understand.
Japanese Study of Foreign Languages
The Japanese are known to study foreign languages as a measure of their intelligence, and as a way cultivating their own culture. To study a foreign language means going to a higher level than just being able to communicate with the native speakers of the language. This includes learning about the language’s history and deeper analysis of its usage (Suguita, Sawaki and Haranda 542). The most common languages that Japanese locals have taken to studying are French, Russian, and German. Korean, despite being spoken in the neighboring country of Korea, is not given any preference, with most Japanese saying that the language is difficult to learn and speak.
The Friction between Japan and South Korea
The bilateral relationship between Japan and South Korea has become more strained, with Japan changing her description of Korea from "a close neighboring country that shares values such as democracy, freedom, and a market economy with Japan" to "an important neighboring country." This difference in the description of Korea by Japan is an indication that even the top leadership of the country have a divergent towards Korea as a whole, her culture and language included. The friction is evident among the citizens of both countries. In a survey carried out by the Japanese government in 2014, it emerged that approximately 65% of the respondents said that they have no friendly feelings towards Koreans (Suguita, Sawaki and Haranda 545). They would not even be interested in learning the Korean language.
Influences on Attitudes towards the Korean Language
The attitude towards the Korean language by the Japanese might have been influenced by several factors. One of them is a history of past interactions and relationships. In 2013, the anti-Korean sentiment was at its peak in Japan, with Japanese calling for the deportation of Koreans back to their country. Slogans filled with derogatory Japanese words for the Koreans were rife, with Koreans being openly discriminated against in public facilities like restaurants and public transport systems. The bookstores were also stocked with books saying how shameless and Koreans are, which were generated by historical wrongdoings of colonization, war, and aggression between the two countries in the colonial era (Mente 67).
Authority figures and the political elite also have a role to play in the fueling the negative attitude of the Japanese towards the Koreans. The sentiments they make about their respective countries in their public speeches influence the opinions of the followers towards their neighboring countries. When the leader of Japan recently described Korea as merely an important neighbor, the nation might have taken this to mean that the strife and strain were bound to intensify (Lee and Lee 92). The attitude of the Japanese government towards managing these trends has not made the situation any better. It has adopted a policy that blatantly upholds ethnic discrimination against Koreans by making their schools ineligible for government-sponsored.
Factors that Influence Language Attitudes
In reference to part 1 of this assignment, it is evident that people perceive others based on how they speak and form attitudes towards foreign languages based on their interactions or their beliefs about that language. In most cases, bias, prejudice, or a general disliking towards a specific language may also influence attitudes towards the language (Gabryś-Barker, Gałajda and Wojtaszek 143). Generalization of situations may lead people to make the wrong conclusion about people who speak a particular language. In the case of the Japanese people, they formed resentment towards the Koreans who were responsible for the war that happened many years ago and have carried forward the resentment to innocent Koreans who had nothing to do with the war. Language biases can give rise to discrimination of the highest form (Lee and Lee 97).
When people perceive a language to be difficult to learn, they also form a negative attitude towards it, that when they perceive it to be easy. The Japanese view the Korean language hard, despite having several similarities. The negative attitude could have been propelled by the general dislike of the Korea locals by the Japanese. To counter prejudice and perceptions towards other languages, specific steps like encouraging foreign language learning (Lauchlan and Couto 85) should be taken at the individual and international level. There is also a need to appreciate diversity and accept that differences in languages serve to bring cohesion among the speakers of the languages by creating the necessity to understand each other through learning the other language. Cultural differences serve to bring people together, especially through language (Lauchlan and Couto 87).
Works Cited
Gabryś-Barker, Danuta, et al. Multiculturalism, multilingualism and the self : studies in linguistics and language learning. Cham: Springer, 2017. document.
Lauchlan, Fraser and M Carmen Parafita Couto. Bilingualism and minority languages in Europe : current trends and developments. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017. print.
Lee, Jang Ho and Semi Lee. "Analyzing the Correlation Between Attitudes Towards Classroom Language Uses and Individual Learner Variables of EFL learners." Korean Journal of Applied Linguistics (2017): 81-105. document.
Mente, Boye De. DescriptionWrite a report on the customer satisfaction problem attached in
notes. The customer satisfaction problem is labelled as the OUTPUT ACTIVITY. Tokyo:
Tuttle Pub, 2012. print.
Suguita, Maya, Yasuyo Sawaki and Tetsuo Haranda. "Foreign Language Learning Motivation in
the Japanese Context: Social and Political Influences on Self." The Modern Language
Journal (2017): 533-547. document.
