Korean-Speaking Spaces: Heritage Language Learning and Community Access for Mixed-Race Korean Americans

• In Event: Examining Language, Community, and Identity in a Global Context

Abstract

Community spaces are vital for heritage language (HL) maintenance in that social interactions creates affordances for authentic, comprehensible language use. However, access to these spaces is not equal for all members of the HL community. I examine the experiences of eight mixed-race Korean Americans across “Korean-speaking spaces”—spaces where, due to the likely presence of Korean speakers, the expectation there might be to speak Korean, making them potential sites for informal HL learning. I rely on a language socialization approach, spatial analysis, and theory from raciolinguistics to reveal the racialized ways these individuals and their language is perceived across spaces and how these processes restrain their access to these spaces and create ideological conflicts for language use with Korean speakers.

Author

• Samantha Harris, University of California - Santa Barbara