study aims to explore the language attitudes toward the regional language and the identity as community members among Korean Language Learners(KLLs) who have migrated and reside in Jeonnam. It is important to pay attention to KLLs as community members, considering they communicate with speech community members who use the regional language. Therefore, in-depth interviews were conducted with six KLLs residing in Jeonnam to examine their language attitudes and identities. Analysis revealed that the KLLs exhibited a neutral attitude toward regional language, perceiving them as natural and commonplace. They positively accepted and used these dialects within their regional community. Furthermore, during the early stages of migration, learners experienced a lack of community belonging due to their unfamiliarity with regional language and insufficient language proficiency. However, through the process of striving to belong to the regional community, they began to unconsciously use the regional language, demonstrating that they employ the same linguistic resources as community members.
To clarify the concepts of dialects, vernacular and regional languages used with similar meanings, this study attempted to reveal the usage patterns and concepts of these expressions based on written corpus. The written corpus of printed newspaper articles from the online Naver News Library that archived newspaper articles from 1920 to 1999 and the news article corpus crawled by the online Naver News portal from January 1, 2004 to December 31, 2021 were extracted and analyzed. In particular, this paper analyzed the relationship between collates and keywords based on the corpus linguistic research methodology of the news article corpus for the past eighteen years and how they were being used in official records and press documents by corresponding with the 'dialects, vernacular, and regional languages' in socio-linguistic terms of modern Korean. The results are summarized as follows. First, the concept of linguistic norms that a dialects have terms corresponding to the words or standard languages was established after the 1930s. Second, in the library of newspaper articles published in the 20th century, dialects or vernaculars were perceived as negative objects to be removed in preparation for standard language. Third, it can be seen that the positive value judgment on 'vernacular' has increased in the corpus of news articles over the past decade. Fourth, dialects and vernacular, regional language, and standard language were used to be compatible with each other, and it can been seen that dialects were mainly used in academic contexts and vernacular were mainly used in everyday contexts. Fifth, it can be confirmed that the positive perception of standard language has been maintained in the 20th-century newspaper article corpus and the 21st-century news article corpus for the last eighteen years after the recognition of standard language.