There are two national holidays in October. One is the National Foundation Day of Korea (October 3rd). The other is Hangul day (October 9th). We celebrate the day when King Sejong invented Hangul and commemorate the quality and superiority of the Hangul. Hangul is easy to learn and it is considered to one of the most scientific writing systems in the world. In celebration of Hangul day, we conducted a survey of 390 CWNU students to get information about their linguistic habits.

The first question was: How often do you use adopted words and foreign languages? 204 of 390 students said they use them frequently (52%) and 168 of 390 students said sometimes (43%). Only 6 of 390 students said rarely (5%). According to this, using adopted and foreign languages is prevalent among CWNU students.

The following question was: Why do you use adopted words and foreign languages? What is remarkable in this question is that 64% of students use adopted words and foreign languages habitually even though they have words in Korean. What is worse, the reason they gave for using them was that it looks cool or smart.

The next question was: Where do you encounter adopted words and foreign languages mainly? The results show us that students mostly encounter those in song lyrics (37%). The next highest response is the name of products (21%).

The last question was: What do you think about using adopted words and foreign languages more than Hangul? Unexpectedly, almost same percentage of students said we need to reform it and it is no problem (19%, 51%).

Forcing “Hangul only” use is behind the times in a global era. However, we are destroying Hangul in many ways. For example, we use neologism which is made of Hangul and English. We should always remember that the undiscerning use of adopted words and foreign languages can affect our use of Korean and Hangul. When we think about the superiority of Hangul and use it properly, we can preserve it for the next generation.

Jo Yu-Na  -

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