2015, Vol.23, No.3

The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.57

pISSN : 1226-4822
https://journal.kci.go.kr/socioling

This paper builds on the special lecture that I gave at the 2015 Fall Meeting of the Sociolinguistic Society of Korea. The overall paper takes a kind of narrative form with reflective confession. Specifically, it consists of (1) scholarly genealogy of my study, (2) main characteristics of my study, (3) major achievements of my study, and (4) my special relationships with the Sociolinguistics Society of Korea.

This study, first, examines the present international status/prestige of Korean on the basis of the number of speakers, the number of countries where it is spoken, the size of GDP by language, and the comprehensive evaluation considering other factors as well as the number of speakers and the economic factor. This research, next, predicts the ‘rather dismal’ future status of Korean based on the predicted statistics of Korea's future population and potential economic growth rate provided by domestic and international organizations. Finally, implications of the findings of this study are discussed and some suggestions on governmental policies, which could be of help to maintain the current international status of Korean, are given.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how people perceive their surrounding landscape in terms of ethnosemantic perspective. The research area is named as ethnophysiography, which is coined recently. The paper is based on the ethnographic data collected in two different areas: mountain and plain area. Speakers in two areas perceive and categorize their landscape very similarly. The similarity can be explained by the concept ‘cognitive saliency.’ which means that people perceive their environments with respect to the cognitively and perceptually salient features. However, this study is a pilot one, which should be refined with more empirical data collected with the ethnographic method in various areas.