The increase of immigrants is an important turning point to attract attention to the distinct characteristics of minority groups and cultural diversity in society. Since the mid-2000s, the Koreans society experienced an increase of immigrants for marriage and started to pay attention to characteristics of their language and culture and their effects on individual immigrants, family relation and children. Recently, there has been an increase of study on “multi-cultural families” but these studies presumed negative aspects of the minority language and culture. Furthermore, it is hard to find any studies focusing on the minority language and culture without prejudice.
Therefore, this study tries to figure out policy agenda on the basis of trends and difficulties in using and succeeding the minority language and culture between generations of multi-cultural families including immigrants for marriage from developing countries, who are majority of the immigrants and contrasting with immigrants from developed countries in using language and culture. Furthermore, this study explores possibilities to change the use of the minority language and culture for positive direction and to increase practicality of policy support.
This study adopts individual and group interviews as main methodology for research and analysis. The core interviewees are immigrants with children older than 4 years and their husbands. This study conducts 59 interviews including interviews for comparison groups.
Their language use is not far different from other monolingual families, although family members use different languages. Their daily lives are based on Korean, which is the main language among all, and they hardly ever use the minority language. The mother tongue of the immigrants is their individual language instead of the common language for their family members. Their children understands only few words of the minority languages, because their mothers hardly use them. By contrast, immigrants with high education, using English or Chinese which are majority languages as foreign languages, and their husbands use such foreign languages in their daily lives and the families feature substantial characteristics of dual-language families.
Among multi-cultural families, families with immigrants of minority languages have complex difficulties in developing dual-language possibilities for their children and their own use of the minority languages. For succession of minority languages, environments to support the use of those languages are necessary but the reality of multi-cultural families are filled with bias towards the use of minority languages. They are worried about negativity of developing dual-language abilities for their children. As a result, the multi-cultural families absolutely depend on Korean as the common language for the families. In addition, direct and indirect obstacles for the use of minority languages are prevalent along with the absolute reliance upon the use of Korean.
Under these circumstances, a little movement in succession of minority languages of immigrants for marriage has been perceived recently. Parents and other relatives of the immigrants strongly demand the succession of the minority languages. Furthermore, husbands or the in-laws support the use of the minority language. The multi-cultural families even find positive cases where children of multi-cultural families are fluent in those minority languages as well as Korean. The practical value of the minority language has been highly appreciated as well. Some of the immigrants try to use their mother tongue in their daily lives.
On the basis of these results, this study proposes policy measures to activate daily use of diverse language and culture in multi-cultural families and to encourage succession of such language and culture between generations as follows:
- to consolidate policy aims to use language and culture suitable for the reality of multi-cultural families
- to provide systemic countermeasures for major obstacles
- to prepare cornerstones to activate rules for use of language in family
- to expand opportunities for education of dual languages and to systemize the programs.
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