Our guest blogger this week, Shiin Moon, tells us: “I have been living my whole life as a majority South Korean in Seoul and taught elementary students for 5 and a half years. To me, language learning has always been tied to power and social mobility of my students and of myself, and now I am so happy to delve deeper into this association in Montréal. I am a second-year master’s student in the Second Language Education program at McGill University, and interested in language socialization, language ideologies, and language learning experience of migrants in Québec.”

This blog post includes a linked audio file. Just click on the link below if you would like to hear the post read aloud. Scroll down to read the text.

“I taught her to use the stronger accent. I told her, I know you are a North Korean, but with the worst North Korean accent. That’s not the way we do it in the South.”

from Moranbong Club

This excerpt was voiced by a South Korean comedian (FYI, not the one in the picture) while she was describing her experience of teaching her fellow North Korean performer how to ‘speak North’ – in a TV talk show named Moranbong Club (Lim & Jung, 2015-present). Her remark implies how North Koreans have been deployed, consumed, and delegitimized in South Korean society, especially through their speech.

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