This study examines public perceptions and language ideologies regarding English use in Korea‘s linguistic landscape by analyzing 2,191 online news comments concerning the English-only menu controversy in 2023. The analysis reveals that negative comments (89%) significantly outnumbered accepting ones (11%). Critical responses view English use as displaying pretentiousness and cultural subservience while posing a threat to Korean linguistic and cultural identity. Critics raise concerns regarding language use, such as incorrect English usage, inconsistent bilingual practices, and discrepancies between displayed and actual proficiency. They also point to issues of information accessibility and the broader trend of excessive English use in Korean society. By contrast, accepting perspectives justify English menu use based on business owners’ autonomy, strategic marketing, the basic comprehensibility of the English used, and the naturalness of English use in the global era. The findings highlight that monolingualism prevails, with English perceived as distinctly “foreign,” while also revealing contradictions in public attitudes, including overreliance on foreign validation of Korean, conflicting views on linguistic hierarchy, and ambivalent attitudes toward English proficiency. This study contributes to a better understanding of public perceptions of English in Korea‘s linguistic landscape and the ideological dynamics underlying language choice in public spaces.

This study analyzes the user-generated reviews of Paris-based Michelin three-star restaurants in terms of how they are discursively constructed. Using the reviews posted in Tripadvisor in 2019 as data, it examines how positive reviews (PR) and negative reviews (NR) are framed with distinct discursive practices. While PR and NR a re both characteriz ed by the discursive practice of highlighting professed culinary expertise of the reviewer, this feature is more foregrounded in NR, where the reviewer is generally more oriented to showing themselves as being entitled to write a review. In terms of communicative styles, PR is also characterized by a heavy use of symbolic and metaphoric language, while more ordinary style of language is used in NR, embedded in the context of critiquing specific items of dish or service. While PR and NR both tend to make references to Michelin star status as a basis of their evaluation, they were shown to differ in terms of the tones or keys used in describing chefs, and also in the way the target of evaluation is formulated. The findings shed light on how and why the members of foodie community construct the language the way they do, and have implications for genre analysis.

This paper aims to use a critical discourse analysis (CDA) to analyze types of online news headlines about COVID-19 on cruise ship, the Diamond Princess, and to identify different traits between conservative newspapers and progressive ones. 480 articles were collected from five major news outlets in Korea: Chosun Ilbo, Joongang Ilbo, Donga Ilbo, Hankyoreh, and Kyunghyang Shinmun. The results show that the headlines tend to contain negative or extreme vocabulary and to employ quotes from experts or even from unknown sources in order to criticize Japan and blame the Japanese government for their way of dealing with the situation. In the case of differences between politically biased sources, it was found that the conservative media inclines toward framing negative images of the Japanese government by publishing more articles than the progressive media and by using numbers and statistics to clearly describe the surge of infected people on the ship. They also published more articles than the progressive media about Korea's actions to bring Koreans back home from the ship, framing positive images about the Korean government. As can be seen, the online news headlines are politically biased and manipulatively framed, so readers' discretion is necessary.