Korean as capital, Russian as deficit: the linguistic market of South Korea’s Koryo-saram diasporic enclaves

Abstract

Russian-speaking Koryo-saram descend from Koreans who migrated to Soviet Russia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and were later forcibly deported to Central Asia by the Soviet government. Following the Soviet Union’s collapse, many Koryo-saram responded to South Korea’s diaspora engagement and migrated there to seek job opportunities, later constructing enclaves featuring Russian-language signage and imagery and products from Russian-speaking countries. Employing Bourdieu’s concept of the linguistic market which posits that language users occupy different social positions based on their linguistic capital, this article analyses interviews with Russian-speaking bi/multilingual Koryo-saram migrants who possess at least some Korean proficiency. In their metapragmatic evaluation of the enclaves’ Russian-language signage, the interviewees reproduce dominant ideologies that necessitate migrants’ linguistic assimilation into South Korean society, drawing on their linguistic capital (Korean proficiency) to invoke perceived differences in socio-economic integration between themselves and most Koryo-saram who are monolingual Russian speakers. They contrast Korean with Russian, framing the former as linguistic capital for accessing socio-economic opportunities in South Korea and the latter as linguistic deficit that engenders the socio-economic marginalization of Koryo-saram in the country. This study underscores how bi/multilingualism becomes a resource for negotiating social (im)mobility during ethnic return migration.