This study examines linguistic variation in Korean spoken by the first generation of Korean immigrants to the United States (1903–1924), a group that marked the beginning of Korean-American history. While some studies have explored the language of contemporary Korean Americans, limited prior research has addressed the Korean language of these early immigrants. Around 1975, second-generation Korean American Sonia Shinn Sunoo conducted a large-scale oral history project, interviewing early Korean immigrants. Among the collected recordings, more than 40 participants used Korean for their interviews. Despite their historical and linguistic value, these recordings do not appear to have been used for linguistic research. Analysis reveals that early immigrants’ Korean reflects the regional dialects of early twentieth-century Korea and extensive English lexical borrowing. Rather than showing large-scale lexical changes influenced by Japanese in Korea during the same period, their speech demonstrates a strong English influence. This study highlights the sociolinguistic and historical significance of the early Korean immigrants' language use and calls for further scholarly attention to this valuable linguistic heritage.

The purpose of this study is to point out the problems of Korean language policy and education through some phenomena of variation and change in Korean language, and to show how they should go in the future. Since language policy and education are directly related to the status of language, in Chapter 2 we outline the current status and situation of Korean. In Chapter 3, we examine some of the variations and changes in Korean language, which are highly interesting from a social perspective. Based on these results, in Chapter 4, we present the direction of Korean policy and education as ‘rich and just Korean’. So far, the key direction of policy and education for the Korean language has been ‘window-dressing language policy’ and ‘window-dressing language education’. They have attempted to refine Korean by simplifying and abstracting the various language facts and disregarding of the elements that seemed not to be beautiful. The language policy and education caught up in the ‘beautiful Korean’ obsession have lasted for decades in Korean. Now Korean speakers should be liberated from ‘beautiful and pure Korean’ ideology. We should pay more attention to local dialects, North Korean words, slang and buzzwords, and net languages. We need to accept new concepts through contact with other languages. With its diversity, richness, and political correctness, Korean will be able to keep its place firmly in the strong waves of English and grow into an important language of the world.

The purpose of this study was to investigate changes of language anxiety in EFL classroom and relation between the change in anxiety and learners’ performance. The participants were 76 first-year non-English majors from various disciplines of a Korean university. Demographic information questionnaire, English performance test, and Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale were administered to the participants at two time points during a 12-week interval. Mean differences of quantitative data from Time 1 and Time 2, effects of gender and self-perceived proficiency level on anxiety, and the relationship between anxiety and performance were statistically analyzed. The results revealed significant decrease in English anxiety over time, significant effect of self-perceived proficiency level on anxiety, and negative correlation between variation of anxiety level and successful performance. This study suggests that reducing learners’ anxiety level might help their language improvement, and self-perceived language proficiency might be correlated to changes in language anxiety in EFL classroom. Possible implications for English instructors and limitations for future research were presented.