Changing attitudes toward heritage language education: a longitudinal study of marriage-migrant mothers in South Korea

ABSTRACT

This study explores Vietnamese marriage-migrant mothers’ changing attitudes toward heritage language (HL) education in South Korea through narratives collected in an interview setting over a period of four years. The findings show that while the mothers placed some value on HL education, they initially prioritized Korean at home because they viewed it as key to their children’s academic success in Korea. However, the mothers’ perceptions of the value of their native language changed over time, influenced by their increasing awareness of the benefits of bilingualism, their imagined bilingual communities, Korea’s increasingly competitive job market, and their children’s social and academic experiences in school. Over time, the mothers came to view their minority language as an asset rather than a deficit and thus chose to invest in developing their children’s HL skills to position them as potentially valuable bilingual workers in both Korean and transnational contexts. The participants’ narratives reflect their view of the minority HL as primarily a socioeconomic resource rather than an identity resource, while the longitudinal study highlights the dynamism and changing nature of language ideologies in relation to HL maintenance.

KEYWORDS:

• Heritage language education
• marriage migrants
• language attitude
• investment
• mixed-heritage children
• longitudinal

1. Introduction

The massive influx of marriage-migrants into South Korea (hereafter ‘Korea’) has led to a rapid rise in the number of Korean children of mixed heritage. Most of these foreign brides come from China, Vietnam, and the Philippines. According to the Korean Educational Statistics Service (2021), the number of mixed-heritage children enrolled in elementary and secondary schools rose from 46,954 in 2012 to 159,629 in 2021, an increase of approximately 340 percent. Although they are often labeled damunhwa (‘multicultural’)¹, due to their mixed-heritage background, these children are born and raised in Korea as Koreans and speak Korean as their first language (L1), with limited opportunities to develop their heritage language (HL) skills. They might be exposed to their mother’s L1 at home, but until recently there has been little institutional support for teaching migrant languages in Korea, and such support is still quite limited, especially in the case of Southeast Asian languages (Han and Price 2015; Kim and Kim 2023; Park 2019; Sohn and Kang 2020). Southeast Asian languages tend to be regarded as less important/lower status based on a perceived lack of their socioeconomic value. Thus, even though some of these languages (e.g. Vietnamese, Cambodian, Tagalog) have substantial representation within the marriage-migrant population in Korea, fluency in those languages is not regarded as a priority when compared to other global languages, such as English, Chinese, and Japanese (Kim and Kim 2023; Sohn and Kang 2020). Thus, the responsibility to provide HL education for their mixed-heritage children falls largely on individual families. However, marriage-migrants’ internalization of dominant discourses regarding their ethnic heritage and HLs can lead them to limit their HL use at home. Additionally, some immigrant mothers’ Korean family members do not support HL education, and the mothers themselves are often concerned about negative consequences for their children if they learn and use the HL (Han and Price 2015; Kim and Kim 2023; Park 2019).

Previous research on damunhwa families has indicated that the ideology of one nation, one race, and one language in Korea, along with Korea’s lack of experience with multicultural education, contributes to the marginalization of immigrants and of multilingualism in immigrant languages (Shin 2012). More recently, however, the Korean government has begun to realize the value of the linguistic and cultural resources that marriage-migrants bring to the Korean economy (Sohn and Kang 2020). By validating the bilingual skills of these migrant women, the government has tried to promote bilingualism for their children and to mobilize both Korean and HLs as symbolic resources for the nation’s economy, portraying mixed-heritage children as potential global injae (‘talented human assets’) due to their potential (multi)linguistic and cultural capital (Shin 2019). The tensions between the old discourse that denigrates HLs as a barrier to mixed-heritage children’s success and instead promotes assimilation and the new discourse, which pitches HLs as desirable capital that merits investment and development, has sparked transformations in mixed-heritage children’s linguistic identities. Yet, Han and Price (2015) point out that the Korean government’s support of dual language students and families may not be based on their general support for ideologies of multiculturalism. Rather, it is connected to the country’s economic development, which can further marginalize languages of perceived lesser symbolic and instrumental value (Lew and Choi 2023).

Although a substantial body of literature has studied the experiences of marriage-migrant women (e.g. Kim 2010; Lee, Kim, and Lee 2015; Park 2017; 2020; Sohn and Kang 2020) and their children (e.g. Kim and Kim 2015; Walton 2020) in Korea, much less research has focused on damunhwa mothers’ attitudes toward HLs and their investment in HL education. Previous research has demonstrated that immigrant mothers’ language attitudes affect their children’s HL maintenance (e.g. Park 2019; Song 2010); however, these have been predominantly cross-sectional, examined at a particular point in time. There has been far less discussion concerning the potential changeable nature of those attitudes, informed by longitudinal data, as in this current study. Individuals’ perceptions of languages, language learning, and linguistic identities are complex and can change throughout their lives (Kroskrity 2004; Woolard 2021), as such perceptions are constantly mediated and impacted by the surrounding social environments and cultures. Damunhwa mothers are no exception. Consequently, if we want to understand the role of HLs in Korea’s increasingly multicultural society, it is important to look at how and why damunhwa mothers’ attitudes toward their HLs and HL education for their children may change over time.

Drawing on interviews with three Vietnamese immigrant mothers over a period of four years, this longitudinal study investigates their shifting beliefs and attitudes toward HL education as influenced by the changing sociocultural contexts and circumstances within which these women live and raise their children. Specifically, the study addresses the following questions:

1.	What are these three Vietnamese immigrant mothers’ perceptions of HL education?
2.	Have their perceptions regarding HL education changed over time? What influenced any such changes?
3.	How have their perceptions affected their investment in their children’s HL education?

2. Investment and ideology as conceptual frameworks

This study takes a poststructuralist approach to HL learning, drawing on Darvin and Norton’s (2015) notion of investment, to make sense of immigrant mothers’ attitudes toward HL education and their efforts to teach their children their HLs. Influenced by the concepts of ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1983) and ‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu 1986), Darvin and Norton used the idea of investment to develop a comprehensive understanding of the relationships between language learners’ desires, their identities, and the language practices of a given community. As they argue, if learners invest in a second language, they do so because they want to ‘acquire a wider range of symbolic and material resources, which will in turn increase the value of their cultural capital and social power’ (2015, 37).

Investment is inherently speculative; it is imagination that motivates learners to invest in language learning as they envisage their investment leading to eventual access to and membership in an imagined community, that is, a ‘[group] of people, not immediately tangible and accessible, with whom we connect through the power of the imagination’ (Kanno and Norton 2003, 241). In the case of language learning, the notion of imagined communities represents language learners’ hopes for the future and desire to belong to a particular community of practice (Norton 2013; Norton Peirce 1995) and, in some cases, to distance themselves from other identities or communities (e.g. Norton 2001). These imagined communities have a significant impact on learners’ actions, educational goals, and investment in language learning because they enable language learners to expand their range of possible selves and act in the present for a better future (Dörnyei 2009).

As previous studies have shown, the desire for belonging and the associated capital can lead individuals, especially those with bilingual backgrounds, to invest intensely and strategically in their language learning (Dagenais 2003; Norton Peirce 1995). Although Bourdieu (1986) identified several types of capital (e.g. cultural, social, economic), with these categories interacting with each other (See May 2011; Mu 2014). For example, cultural capital, which encompasses knowledge and skills, such as being able to speak the language of a particular group, can be converted into economic capital if the knowledge, skills, and access to the specific language community are valued and rewarded financially. Notions of the type and amount of capital that investment in language learning can provide, assessments of the cost of said investment, and the calculus and final decision regarding whether to invest in HL learning are all informed by language ideologies.

McGroarty (2010) has defined language ideologies as ‘abstract (and often implicit) belief systems related to language and linguistic behavior that affect speakers’ choices and interpretations of communicative interaction’ (3). Individuals and groups adopt and develop language ideologies, both explicit and implicit, based on their sociocultural experiences (Kroskrity 2004). However, the perceived value of a language can change as a result of, for example, cultural, societal, and economic shifts, or changes in an individual’s personal goals or socioeconomic circumstances, which in turn influence how groups and individuals respond to a language’s presence, use, and investment (e.g. Song 2010). Similarly, language learners can shift their perspectives toward language learning or develop critical awareness of dominant language ideologies associated with language and language learning (e.g. Leeman 2012).

3. Parental attitudes toward HL transmission and maintenance

Previous studies have shown that immigrant parents, particularly in English-dominant countries, value HL ability, including diasporic Vietnamese migrant families (e.g. Mu 2014; Park and Sarkar 2007; Tran 2022). Their favorable attitudes led to HL maintenance efforts, such as designating the HL as the home language and/or striving to immerse their children in HL-speaking communities, which in turn positively influenced the children’s HL fluency. A small but emerging body of research on the HL-related experiences of mixed-heritage children in Korea, however, has shown that their HLs are not well maintained because of their parents’ fear of racial discrimination and a strong desire for their children to assimilate. These are not baseless fears. Several studies have demonstrated that mixed-heritage children tend to experience social and racial exclusion in educational contexts. Walton (2020), for example, pointed out that for multiethnic students, especially those with darker skin who were seen by their peers as ‘too different,’ their everyday experience of difference was a key factor that structured their lives at school.

Mixed-heritage children in Korea are typically perceived as not performing well academically; several scholars have examined this disparity in academic achievement between native Korean students and students of mixed parentage, the latter having much higher dropout rates (Jo, Seo, & Kwon 2008; Lee, Kang, and Kim 2008). The academic difficulties experienced by these mixed heritage children are often blamed on a lack of Korean language proficiency, resulting from having non-Korean mothers. For example, in a study of mainstream early childhood educators’ perspectives on multicultural children in Korea and their language use, Lew and Choi (2022) observed a tendency toward deficit-oriented views and monolingual, Korean-centered ideologies. These ideologies, present in the school, home, and general society, further discourage HL investment. Park (2019) observed this among Southeast Asian immigrant mothers who were based in communities where these ideologies were prevalent and who demonstrated a lack of investment in their children’s HL learning and use as a result.

In the context of multicultural families in Korea, choosing whether to invest in teaching the mother’s HL to the children, and the ability to then do so, requires agency. Any individual’s agency is socioculturally mediated (Ahearn 2001) and co-constructed with their social network and the larger society (Lantolf and Pavlenko 2001). Immigrant mothers thus tend to develop complex and ambivalent attitudes toward HL maintenance, as they are raising mixed-heritage children in Korea’s racially stratified, academically competitive, and still largely monolingual and monocultural society.

4. The study

4.1. Participants

This study draws on fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2019 in a rural city in North Gyeongsang Province, Korea. Approximately 40% of the total marriage-migrant population residing in this region are from Vietnam, the largest marriage-migrant group in the province. Snowball sampling was conducted to find participants for a larger study of HL maintenance among Southeast Asian immigrant women in Korea. This current study focuses on three of these participants because they agreed to participate in a follow-up interview four years later. Two sets of qualitative interviews were thus conducted, in 2015 and in 2019 respectively, with each of them.

The participants were all born in Vietnam, moved to Korea as marriage-migrants, and had all lived in Korea for over fourteen years at the time of the follow up interviews. The participants all had school-aged children who were born and raised in Korea and spoke Korean and Vietnamese as their first languages. However, they mainly used Korean as the primary language in their daily lives while using Vietnamese as a secondary language with their mothers. None of the participants’ husbands or parents in-law understood or spoke Vietnamese.

One participant (Jeong) had a high school education and the other two participants (Sooah and Kyung) had finished two- or three-year college programs. The participants’ children ranged in age from eight to fifteen years old as of 2019. Kyung’s daughter was the only child who had lived outside Korea, living in Vietnam between the ages of one and four. Tables 1 and 2 lay out the specifics of the participants’ and their children’s backgrounds. All names are pseudonyms.

Table 1. Participants’ backgrounds as of 2019.

Name	Age	Time in Korea	Highest degree held	Job	Korean language ability^a
Jeong	37	14 years	High school (in Vietnam)	Salesperson/Vietnamese teacher	Level 3
Kyung	37	15 years	3-year college (in Vietnam)	Farmer/interpreter	Level 4
Sooah	37	15 years	2-year college (in Korea)	Farmer/housewife	N/A

^a The Korean language ability of the participants is based on their results on the Test of Proficiency in Korean (TOPIK), an examination administered by Korea’s National Institute for International Education. TOPIK levels 3 and 4 are considered intermediate. Sooah had not taken the test but, having graduated from a two-year college in Korea, her proficiency can be assumed to be fairly advanced.

Table 2. Participants’ children’s backgrounds as of 2019.

	Age	Proficiency in HL^a	Parents’ income^b
Jeong’s child	12	Intermediate	Above average
Kyung’s children	12 & 14	High Beginner	Average
Sooah’s children	8, 12, & 15	High Beginner	Average

^a These are the participants’ ratings of their children’s HL proficiency.

^b Estimated household income relative to the average monthly household income of a Korean family (about 4.445 million won or approximately 4,100 USD; Statistics Korea 2017).

The participants had all moved to Korea in their early 20s, having met their husbands through commercial marriage agencies. Before migrating, the participants had no or very little knowledge of the Korean language and culture.

At the time of interviewing, Sooah lived in an extended family household with her parents in-law, whereas Jeong and Kyung lived in nuclear families, with their respective husbands and children. However, Jeong and Kyung reported that their in-laws visited their homes regularly and exercised ongoing decision-making power in their families. In terms of employment, Jeong worked as a salesperson at a cosmetics company and as a part-time Vietnamese teacher at an elementary school. Kyung worked as a Vietnamese interpreter for the regional Multicultural Education Center. Sooah mostly worked on her family’s farm but had sporadically taken part-time paid jobs. For all of them, their paid jobs were low-wage and unstable.

4.2. Data collection and analysis

The primary research method used in this current study was semi-structured interviews, which were designed to elicit detailed narratives regarding the immigrant mothers’ language use and efforts to facilitate HL maintenance and development among their children. The first author interviewed each participant, first in 2015 and then in a follow-up interview in 2019. Between the two interview periods, she kept in touch with the participants via regular informal telephone conversations and in-person lunch meetings once or twice a year when she visited Korea. The time spent together helped build trust and rapport with the participants, which contributed to creating a comfortable atmosphere during the interviews and facilitated the open sharing of personal experiences. The audio-recorded interviews were conducted in Korean, with all the participants being able to fully express their ideas and opinions in that language. The interview questions covered the following topics: the participants’ use of Vietnamese and Korean, perceptions of each language, views on their children’s identity and HL development, their social networks, their relationships with their children, and challenges surrounding HL maintenance and education. Each interview was subsequently transcribed in Korean.

The study used an inductive thematic approach (Braun and Clarke 2006) to analyze the oral narratives. According to Braun and Clarke, ‘a theme captures something important about the data in relation to the research question and represents some level of patterned response or meaning within the data set’ (2006, 82). The first step of the data analysis process involved transcribing the data and noting recurring patterns and ideas to guide the analysis. The second step involved creating initial codes line-by-line by locating specific data related to the research questions, and then grouping the different codes that were connected to each other to create larger categories. These categories were then grouped into themes, which were constantly reviewed as the analysis found links between them and brought forward comparisons and contrasts across participants. These themes are: (1) initial prioritization of Korean and lack of HL investment, (2) reduced prospects of capital return from investment in Korean, (3) increased appeal of Vietnamese and weakening of barriers to HL investment, and (4) imagined bilingual communities as a new site of investment.

5. Findings

5.1. Initial prioritization of Korean and lack of HL investment

In 2015, all three participants reported speaking Korean, the societal language, to their children most of the time and, relatedly, not making much effort to teach them Vietnamese. Although they claimed to see the HL as something valuable that they could pass on to their children, they did not promote its use, even in their own family space, explaining that their Korean family members, including their in-laws, were not in favor of HL learning. All three mothers also described their children as receiving immense pressure to assimilate into the dominant culture and expressed their own belief that learning Korean was key to their children’s academic and social success in Korea (Park 2019). As a result of limited exposure inside and outside the home, none of the children had ever been fluent in the HL; in 2015, the mothers reported that their children predominantly used Korean and had only basic oral communication skills in their Vietnamese HL.

Jeong explained, in a 2015 interview, that although she was interested in teaching her son her HL, she did not actively use it at home because of her Korean family’s resistance to her son learning Vietnamese. Jeong’s son too was resistant to learning the HL, having grown up in Korea hearing consistently negative comments about Vietnam and Vietnamese people. Jeong herself also felt that learning Korean was more important for her child’s socialization in school. In 2019, however, Jeong reported her regret at not having taught him Vietnamese earlier when he was in the upper elementary grades. She explained that her son had learned negative stereotypes attached to his HL and its speakers, had accepted these language ideologies that ascribed inferiority to Vietnamese, and had thus struggled to develop a positive bilingual identity.

In 2015, Kyung, whose daughter had lived in Vietnam between the ages of one and four, expressed positive attitudes toward the HL and said she wanted to teach Vietnamese to her children because she is Vietnamese. However, her in-laws strongly objected to the idea of her teaching Vietnamese, even though her husband was happy with her speaking Vietnamese to her children in their own family space. Kyung also felt pressure to prioritize Korean over the HL. Once her children had entered elementary school, she considered it too late to teach them the HL and did not use much Vietnamese at home, noting the children’s limited ability to understand it and her in-laws’ lack of positivity about her HL use.

Similarly, Sooah initially viewed teaching Korean as the most important task for her children’s academic development. As a migrant and mother of mixed-heritage children, Sooah experienced tremendous pressure to master the Korean language as quickly as possible, which contributed to her decision to use Korean over her children’s HL at home. According to Sooah, her children were not interested in and positive about learning their HL. This was reinforced by her emphasis on Korean language education, reflecting the wider societal language hierarchy for her children which sees Korean as the language of power and status and Vietnamese as the language of the ‘lower’ classes or immigrants.

5.2. Reduced prospects of capital return from investment in Korean

In the initial 2015 interviews, each participant made remarks to the effect that she had once thought migration to Korea would lead to a better life with increased financial stability, happiness, and freedom. This aligns with previous studies’ reports that marriage-migrant women often view migration as a vehicle for upward socioeconomic mobility (e.g. Freeman 2011; Kim 2010). The participants indicated that, being in their early 20s when they first arrived in Korea, they had invested in their own Korean linguistic, cultural, and social development through migration, integration into Korean society, and new Korean-located identities. After becoming mothers, they strove to raise their children as Koreans who spoke Korean as their first language, with imagined futures for them and their children in Korea. In other words, their strong desire to become ‘legitimate’ members of mainstream Korean society made them develop negative attitudes toward their children’s HL learning and use. This was seen in the initial interviews, where the mothers perceived ongoing HL use as a potential source of interference in their children’s Korean language development and full participation in mainstream society. However, the lived experiences of these mothers and their children over time led them to begin to question the viability of Korean-centered success and, accordingly, to rethink their investment strategies.

The mothers observed in both interviews that their mixed-heritage children were largely stigmatized and viewed unfavourably by their Korean peers. Jeong stated that her son had been bullied at school due to having a foreign mother and that this negative experience led him to internalize the wider society’s attitude that his mother’s home country was inferior. In addition, the mothers’ and children’s categorization as damunhwa led to discrimination, when their desire to act and be accepted as legitimate Koreans conflicted with the host society’s expectations that they remain in a subordinate position. In 2019, Kyung described her children’s social experiences at school thus:

From Koreans’ perspective, multicultural children are supposed to be silent. But my children are not. They like to lead. So, their Korean peers and their mothers dislike my children. My children have been bullied in school [for having] a foreign mother.

Kyung stated that, having witnessed her children being socially excluded on account of being mixed heritage (Kim and Kim 2015; Walton 2020), she realized that her children could not erase the mixed-heritage identity evident in their physical appearance and that speaking Korean fluently would not guarantee being perceived and accepted as legitimate members of Korean society by members of the dominant group.

In addition to experiencing social exclusion, the children’s academic performance was also not in line with their mothers’ hopes. For example, in her 2019 interview, Sooah discussed her oldest daughter’s difficulty in socializing with peers in school and her ‘average academic performance.’ Many South Korean parents hold extremely high educational expectations for their children, closely monitoring their academic progress and actively working to help them receive excellent grades. The official ranking of students by their academic performance starts when they enter middle school (around age 13 or 14), but parental planning to get their children admitted to the nation’s most prestigious universities begins even earlier. As a low-income immigrant mother, Sooah could not afford a private tutor and her daughter’s ‘average academic performance’ was insufficient for getting into a good university, which she thought would pose a serious problem given Korea’s increasingly competitive job market and current unemployment crisis.² She thus determined that an alternative path to success was needed if her daughter was to survive in Korea’s hyper-competitive society.

5.3. Increased appeal of Vietnamese and weakening of barriers to HL investment

In contrast to the view that they had of Korea when they first migrated, the mothers described Korea, in their 2019 interviews, as having a lack of potential’ and ‘low employment rates.’ They felt their investment in their children’s Korean upbringing and identities was yielding neither the hoped-for social and economic capital nor access to the desired imagined community. Having witnessed the various challenges faced by their mixed-heritage children in Korea, these mothers no longer believed that focusing solely on their children’s Korean language proficiency and promoting their Korean identities were attainable pathways for their children to become accepted as legitimate members of mainstream Korean society. Furthermore, they had started to critically evaluate the changing value of the heritage country and their HL in Korea and, continuing to pursue opportunities for employment, success, and wealth for their children, began to seek alternative futures for them. In short, a desire for their children to have employment opportunities and financial stability was at the root of their investment in HL-related activities, which has also been noted in other studies (e.g. Mu 2014; Park and Sarkar 2007).

It is important to note that the mothers’ changing investment in their children’s HL was made possible because they were able to persuade their husbands and in-laws by drawing on different (more positive) discourses about Vietnam and the value of learning Vietnamese and becoming multilingual in the globalized world. The growing discourse in Korea around damunhwa children as potential global injae (‘talented human assets’) helped their Korean family members change their perceptions of HL education and bilingualism. Moreover, while the participants’ Korean families were initially opposed to the simultaneous acquisition of two languages (Korean and Vietnamese), they became more supportive of HL education over time.

For example, in 2019, Sooah stated, ‘it has been a couple of years since I started using Vietnamese at home.’ Witnessing her daughter struggling through the Korean education system and wanting to go to university overseas, Sooah decided to teach her Vietnamese. She began constructing a narrative for her daughter wherein ‘Vietnam has a lot of potential,’ counteracting the negative images her daughter had internalized from a young age of Vietnam as a ‘poor’ and ‘underdeveloped’ country. With limited opportunities for exposure to Vietnamese in Korea, from 2015, Sooah started sending her oldest child to Vietnam every year or two to attend a bilingual camp for mixed-heritage children. Although in the past Sooah’s daughter had been ‘ashamed of using Vietnamese in public’, and ‘did not want to learn her mother’s language,’ she now occasionally mentioned ideas such as: ‘when I get into a company, I would like to speak in Vietnamese with pride.’

Like Sooah’s daughter, Jeong’s son, according to his mother, had initially learned and accepted negative stereotypes attached to his HL and its speakers, and had therefore struggled to develop a positive bilingual identity. However, she then sent him to Vietnam to complete his final year of elementary school so that he could improve his HL skills through being immersed in the HL. By living and studying in Vietnam for a year, Jeong’s son acquired Vietnamese quickly and became able to express himself well at an intermediate level. Jeong’s decision had been influenced by her professional experience of becoming a bilingual instructor, as she reflects here:

I only recently realized the importance of teaching Vietnamese through the process of becoming a bilingual instructor. I was interested in HL education, but … I had no confidence and didn’t know how to [teach him]. I got useful tips by getting teacher training and meeting other teachers. I should have started teaching him Vietnamese earlier. I regret that, just like other Vietnamese mothers.

Through participating in the bilingual teacher training program designed by the local Korean government for marriage-migrant mothers, Jeong learned about the benefits of being bilingual and associated tips for raising her son bilingually. Encouraged by recent governmental and media discourses that position HLs as an instrument for advancing individuals’ and the nation’s socioeconomic status and empowered through her teaching program with tools to actively teach her HL, Jeong became far better situated to actively invest in her son’s HL development, wishing only that she had done so sooner.

During her children’s early childhood, Kyung likewise focused on teaching them Korean language and culture to help them better integrate into the Korean educational system. Over time, as she observed the challenges of being mixed heritage in Korea, she came to believe that knowing where they were from, being able to speak the HL, and understanding their dual cultural heritage were important for her children’s well-being and self-esteem. In 2019, Kyung reported, like Sooah, that she had begun to promote HL education more actively by sending her oldest child to a bilingual camp in Vietnam and by teaching her how to read and write in Vietnamese. By 2019, her daughter had returned from her fourth camp in Vietnam. Kyung came to view the development of multilingual competence and international experience as crucial for helping her children overcome the social exclusion they experienced in school. Here she describes how she tried to boost her children’s confidence, emphasizing that although their mixed-heritage background is (still) stigmatized in Korean society, they could turn it to their advantage.

I told my children to be confident and tell their classmates that they have visited many countries like Vietnam, Singapore, and Malaysia and that they can speak Vietnamese, English, and Korean. My children did this, and their Korean classmates didn’t say anything.

Kyung made efforts to expose her children to their HL (and English), especially via international trips, which are particularly prestigious in a rural city. According to Kyung, although their short-term trips to Vietnam had no dramatic impact on her children’s HL skills, the experiences contributed to the children’s cultivation of positive attitudes toward the HL. Kyung pointed out that, although she does not have a high-income job, her children were able to visit the countries mentioned above during their school break due to her husband’s support.

5.4. Imagined bilingual communities as a new site of investment

As the process of globalization has celebrated bilingualism, bilingual competence is increasingly recognized as a valuable resource in Korean society. The neoliberal celebration of bilingualism in Korea, where many Korean parents value the acquisition of Korean-English bilingual competence (Piller and Cho 2013), led these mothers over time to perceive bilingual competence and inherent bicultural identity as a key asset for their children’s future (Park 2021). This recognition then translated into increased investment in their children’s HL development. These Vietnamese mothers stated that they chose to encourage their children to learn their HL as a marker of distinction given the lack of Korean-Vietnamese bilinguals in Korea. They also added that the investment in learning Vietnamese and developing Korean-Vietnamese bilingual identities was a more viable and efficient option for them compared to the costly and highly class-based investment of learning English (Park 2021).

Despite the growing appeal of investment in the HL and in heritage identities for their children, the immigrant mothers’ imagined communities were still strongly linked to the idea of their children’s future selves as bilingual speakers rather than as Vietnamese HL speakers. Rather than a wholly Korean or wholly Vietnamese identity, the mothers instead focused on a hybrid identity characterized by bilingual, bicultural, and transnational competence, conceiving their children as future members of this imagined community with access to the associated forms of capital it would provide.

In the case of Jeong, her construction of an imagined Vietnamese-speaking community and her envisioning of her son in this community seemed to enhance her motivation to teach her child Vietnamese and to send him regularly to Vietnam. Her and her husband’s financial ability enabled them to enroll their son in an international school in Ho Chi Minh City where he learned subjects in Vietnamese and English and met peers from different countries. Jeong invested in her son’s Vietnamese education in the hope that he will come back to Korea to enter a good university and get a job either in Korea or elsewhere, utilizing his bilingual competence.

In 2019, she describes the benefits of acquiring Vietnamese language proficiency, while positioning her child as a future successful bilingual worker with mobility and dynamic transnational ties.

He'll survive [in the job market] if I provide him with language skills. It’ll be a real competition after graduation. [But] my son would have already succeeded. Because he would speak two languages. If he has bilingual competence, he can make money anywhere … My son’s juniors will respect him and will be fascinated by his bilingual competence … He can work and travel around the world.

Jeong’s desire to teach her HL to her child was grounded in her imagination of her child’s life in Korea or ‘around the world,’ believing that her son’s bilingualism would position him advantageously in relation to his Korean peers in Korea (as a marker of distinction from them), and in relation to a wider bilingual community (entry into which she desired for her son). She thus chose to invest more in developing her child’s HL skills and in promoting his potential to become a valuable bilingual worker, arguing that the acquisition of Vietnamese language skills in a Korean context would lead to his employment, success, and financial stability.

It is noteworthy that Jeong’s strategic investment and imagined communities are closely related to the increasingly competitive Korean job market and the concurrent growing market demand for Korean-Vietnamese bilinguals in Korea. From 1988 to 2019, Korea invested 67.7 billion USD in Vietnam, accounting for 18.7 percent of total foreign investment and making Korea Vietnam’s largest investor out of 135 countries (Kotra 2020). The active investment of Korean companies in Vietnam has thus led to a growing demand in both Korean and Vietnamese companies for people with Korean-Vietnamese bilingual skills.

Unlike Jeong who was able to send her child to Vietnam for Vietnamese language learning, Sooah resorted to HL education at home and occasional Korean government-funded language camps, due to the financial constraints that precluded her from investing in her children’s education in Vietnam. However, regarding HL use at home, Sooah did not shift the medium of communication at home from Korean to Vietnamese. Rather, she reported mixing Korean and Vietnamese to accommodate her children’s limited Vietnamese proficiency and also to mitigate their initial resistance to HL learning, while keeping Korean, the medium of instruction in schools, as the predominant language in the home. Although she thought it was ‘too late for [them] to acquire fluency and native-like pronunciation,’ she nevertheless considered bilingualism to be an asset for her daughter’s future educational and career opportunities:

If you learn Vietnamese, you can become injae (‘a talented human asset’). You can speak two languages. Of course, companies may need interpreters … . When entering a Korean company in Vietnam, my children would have an advantage. They can get into a big company. Or, they can get into a company in Korea, using their bilingual competence.

This excerpt shows Sooah’s projection of future bilingual and transnational lives for her children. Sooah imagined her children’s potential contributions to the Korean economy through working in a Korean company that has branches and factories in Vietnam (e.g. Samsung). She created an imagined community in which to envision her children’s future language use and active participation in the workforce built on the belief that bilinguals have a better chance of landing a job in such multinational companies.

6. Discussion and conclusion

The three participants’ narratives illustrate that language attitudes are constantly evolving over time (Kroskrity 2004; Woolard 2021), which affects the ways in which these Vietnamese marriage-migrant mothers in Korea understand the role of the HL and HL education for their children. They also demonstrate that the immigrant mothers’ investment in their children’s HL learning is highly agentive and strategic in that they constantly sought new linguistic resources that can empower their children and help them construct desirable identities (cf. Lew and Choi 2023). During their children’s early childhood, the mothers highlighted the importance of Korean and ignored their children’s HL education under the influence of various deficit discourses and negative language ideologies surrounding mixed-heritage children in Korea (Lee, Kim, and Lee 2015; Shin 2012). However, over time, the mothers’ awareness of the benefits of bilingualism led them to strategically reimagine their children’s transnational futures and redefine the role of the HL and HL education, especially in the context of changing socioeconomic relationships and conditions in both Korea and Vietnam. As Li and Zhu (2019) have recently pointed out, transnational imagination has been found to play a crucial role in changing language ideologies and practices for immigrant mothers in Korea. A discourse of damunhwa children as a potential bilingual human resource (injae) and Vietnam as a new land of (economic) opportunity were key aspects of this imagination that have led to the subsequent active maintenance, rather than rejection, of Vietnamese as an HL. Moreover, the mothers in this study realized the low likelihood of educational and employment success through traditional pathways based on a critical evaluation of the initial racialized prejudices they faced, the negative impact this had on their children’s academic performance, a related lack of resources to support their learning, and Korea’s increasingly competitive job market and current unemployment crisis.

The participants’ narratives also emphasize the importance of understanding HL learning in relation to its socioeconomic value. Initially, Vietnamese HL education was not supported in these families based on the stratified status of HL in Korea and internationally, and the perceived low economic power of the mother’s country of origin, which the participants internalized. However, the participants’ narratives reflected a change wherein they came to view the minority HL as ‘a marketable commodity on its own’ (Heller 2003, 474), moving away from an understanding of the HL as primarily ‘a marker of ethnonational identity’ (Heller 2003, 474). The teaching and learning of HLs are often dominated by ideologies centered around the maintenance of linguistic, cultural, and ethnic identities. However, as demonstrated in this study, this view does not automatically result in HL education efforts. For these three mothers, their investment in HL education was largely shaped by the HL’s perceived (new) potential for producing economic value and broadening the opportunities available to their children in both domestic and international markets (e.g. Song 2010). Indeed, the mothers’ aspirations for teaching their children Vietnamese emerged out of their awareness of both local and global discourses and their construction of imagined communities where their children could be viewed as transnational and potentially valuable bilingual workers. The rise of Korean investment in Vietnam and the consequent market demand for Korean-Vietnamese bilinguals provided these mothers with new options for their children. In addition, the recent government and media discourses on damunhwa children as potential ‘global injae’ (Shin 2019) significantly influenced these immigrant mothers’ imaginings of their children’s future selves as (bi)linguistic and cultural mediators, and thus the kind of people who are key to successful international business communication. Challenging the inferior identities imposed on them by mainstream Korean society and adopting a positive discourse concerning multicultural children, the mothers chose (subsequently) to invest actively in developing their children’s HL skills to make them an ideal bilingual self, a global inaje.

The study findings thus validate the importance of transnational resources in helping children maintain and develop their HL skills. Just like other immigrant parents in different countries (e.g. Kwon 2017; Lew and Choi 2023), the marriage-migrant mothers in this study drew on transnational connections and resources due to the lack of institutional, community, and societal support for minority HL education. However, transnational strategies used by the three mothers varied depending on their financial resources. Jeong had sufficient financial resources to support Vietnamese HL education and Vietnamese-English bilingual education in an immersion environment by enrolling her son in an international school in Vietnam. Kyung was able to afford transnational trips to Vietnam and other countries to expose her children to their HL and English. However, Sooah lacked the resources to provide such opportunities. Accordingly, she took advantage of various local government-funded transnational programs provided for damunhwa children, such as Vietnamese language camps.

This study offers several practical implications. First, it is important for marriage-migrant mothers and their family members to have opportunities to develop critical language awareness (Fairclough 1992). Providing immigrant mothers opportunities to critically examine taken-for-granted discourses around their HL and HL education could help them deconstruct their own thoughts on these topics, resist wider linguistic discrimination, and guide their children’s understanding of the complex sociopolitical contexts in which they grow up as children of multicultural families. These can also highlight the merits of their (bi)linguistic and cultural capital (Han and Price 2015; Park 2019).

Second, it is important to provide marriage-migrants with the training and experience to teach their children their HL and, relatedly, to actively foster bilingualism at home. As recent studies have indicated, many marriage-migrant mothers report that their lack of knowledge about bilingualism and bilingual education often functions as an obstacle to their children’s HL learning (Park 2019). As Collier and Thomas (2017) and May (2017) argue, increasing parents’ knowledge of bilingualism and bilingual education would enable them to see themselves as active agents and advocates in their children’s bilingual development.

The mothers in this study supported the HL for instrumental reasons such as career prospects or social mobility, without instilling a cultural identity in their children and seeing the HL as an essential aspect of their identity. The HL was not emphasized as crucial to family communications, resulting in the initial peripheralization of the HL. This may result in children developing a pragmatic attitude toward the HL, unable to engage with the HL in daily life and related heritage identity construction. Marriage-migrant families should be better supported to gain a better understanding of the role of HL in the cultural knowledge, identity, and academic and emotional wellbeing of its speakers and the advantages for children related to being bilingual and bicultural across the full socioeconomic and sociocultural spectrum.

Finally, this study highlights the importance of adding longitudinal analyses to the cross-sectional analyses of HL maintenance among mixed heritage families that continue to dominate the field. Longitudinal studies offer an alternative/additional perspective – reflecting and exploring the dynamism and (potentially) changing nature of language ideologies, and related conceptions of language investment and imagined communities, over time. Future research should focus on developing ways of capturing these aspects more precisely. The findings of this study reported on Vietnamese immigrant mothers’ positive attitude shifts toward HL education. In order to fully understand the evolving perceptions of the HL and their impact on HL learning, it is crucial to explore the dynamic nature of language use and identity among damunhwa students themselves. Shin (2024), for example, highlights that damunhwa children engage in a constant process of renegotiating and reconstructing their linguistic and cultural identities through everyday experiences. Given these complexities, future research needs to examine the dynamic process of shifting perceptions toward HL education held by both damunhwa children and their family members, including their mothers.

Acknowledgement

We are grateful to the editor and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this manuscript. We would also like to thank Stephen May for his insightful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Strategic Research Institute Program for Korean Studies of the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the Korean Studies Promotion Service at the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2022-SRI-2200001).

Notes on contributors

Mi Yung Park

Mi Yung Park is a Senior Lecturer in Asian Studies, School of Cultures, Languages and Linguistics, University of Auckland, New Zealand. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, heritage language maintenance, and language and identity. Her work has appeared in such journals as International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, Language and Education, Language and Intercultural Communication, International Multilingual Research Journal, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, Multilingua, Language Awareness, Classroom Discourse, and Journal of Pragmatics.

Lee Jin Choi

Lee Jin Choi is an Assistant Professor in Department of English Education at Hongik University, South Korea. Her research interests include language and identities in multilingual contexts, and multilingual education. Her work has appeared in International Journal of Bilingualism, Teaching in Higher Education, Language and Education, British Journal of Sociology of Education, and Language in Society.

Notes

1 In this paper, the terms damunhwa, multicultural, and mixed heritage are used interchangeably.

2 In 2013, Korea recorded its highest ever youth employment rate of 8 percent. By 2018, the youth unemployment rate had increased even further to 9.5 percent (Statistics Korea 2019).