Public Language Diagnostic Study for Migrants: Focusing on immigration and social integration network

This study aims to expand the discussion on public language, which has been made only from the perspective of purifying the Korean language for the Korean language-speaking people, and to attempt to diagnose public language for immigrants staying in Korea. Considering that information provided by public institutions is in Korean except for English, Chinese, and some languages, it is easy to guess the difficulty of lack of information as migrants in Korea. In this study, the public language of the social integration program page of the social integration information network that migrants encounter for their initial settlement in Korea was diagnosed. First, when analyzing the social integration program page based on technical terms or expressions, rarely used words or expressions, and awkward expressions, there were many legal terms that were difficult for migrants to understand, and there was no match between difficult literary expressions and subjects and predicates. Sentences, translation-to-sentences, and foreign language expressions were also noticeable. Next, as a result of analyzing 388 vocabulary, beginner vocabulary took up 18.81%, intermediate vocabulary took up the highest at 43.04%, and advanced took up 21.65%. Intermediate or higher vocabulary accounts for 64.69% of the time, suggesting that it will be difficult for migrants at the elementary and middle level to get information from the site without the help of others. However, migrants should also be considered when discussing public language improvement and policies in the future, as they are subject to the guaranteed “right to know” and “right to equality” as members of Korean society. Through this study, it is hoped that migrants’ access to information can be improved by considering migrants’ positions in improving public languages.