The purpose of this study is to identify perceptions of South Korean activists who have been in contact with North Korean defectors, as well as to identify the characteristics of the voices in the field in comparison to the existing research results coming from academic circles. We conducted an in-depth interview with six South Korean activists who had long interacted with North Korean defectors. The research results are as follows. First, in the field, North Korean defectors’ language was viewed as one of the migrants who had been exposed to various environments rather than a sample of North Korean speech. Second, most informants hesitated to generalize the characteristics of North Korean defectors' speech. Rather, they pointed the speech variations found among North Korean defectors depending on various factors such as class, region of origin, generation, length of stay in South Korea, and age at time of entry. Third, they were wary of generalizing “straightness” as a characteristic of North Korean defectors' speech in recognition of the negative implications of the term. These suggest that there exists some gap between the results of academic circles done regarding North Korean defectors’ speech and language awareness in the field.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze systematically the issues and approaches of existing research on language and ideology. In order to accomplish this purpose, this paper first defines ideology as ‘the ideas, beliefs, and values and the material process of (re)producing them that contribute to promoting and legitimizing the sectoral interests of certain social group or power’, noting that such ideology causes social problems when it serves primarily the sectoral interests of a mainstream group or ruling power, often working in a false and deceptive form through distortion and dissimulation of objective reality. Then, this paper raises the necessity to divide the research into two types: the research on ideology ‘about’ language and the research on ideology ‘through’ language. Finally, based on the theoretical discussion above, this paper explores the sociolinguistic research tasks and prospects of research on language and ideology by analyzing the representative research cases and approaches related to Korean language and its usage. This paper particularly focuses on monolingualism and standard language ideology in the case and approach of the research on ideology ‘about’ language, and sexism and gender ideology in the case and approach of the research on ideology ‘through’ language.