This booklet is within the Cambria Sinophone global sequence (General Editor: Victor H. Mair). even though various book-length reports of language and modernity in China and Japan are available even in English, little has been written in any language at the query of linguistic modernity in Korea. contaminated Korean Language, Purity as opposed to Hybridity by way of famous journalist and author Koh Jongsok is a suite of serious essays approximately Korean language and writing positioned on the nexus of contemporary Korean historical past, politics, linguistics, and literature. as well as his journalistic and writing event, Koh additionally occurs to have a prepared curiosity in language and linguistics, and he has acquired postgraduate education on the maximum point in those topics on the Sorbonne. This publication bears witness to the rigors and tribulations-historical, technical and epistemological-by which the Korean language completed "linguistic modernity" less than attempting colonial and neo-colonial situations. particularly, Koh tackles questions of language ideology and language coverage, smooth terminology formation, and inscriptional practices (especially the hugely politicized questions of vernacular script as opposed to chinese language characters, and of orthography) in an educated and delicate manner. the worth of Koh's essays lies within the incontrovertible fact that so little has been written in a serious and politically revolutionary vein-whether scholarly or otherwise-about the tactics wherein conventional Korean inscriptional and linguistic practices grew to become "modern". certainly, the single workforce of teachers from whom one could count on advice during this regard, the "national language stories" students in Korea, were so blinkered via their nationalist proclivities as to provide little of curiosity during this regard. Koh, against this, is considered one of helpful few involved and engaged public intellectuals and artistic writers writing in this subject in an simply comprehensible approach. Little or not anything comes in English approximately sleek Korean language ideologies and linguistic politics. This booklet analyzes the linguistic legacies of the conventional Sinographic Cosmopolis and smooth eastern colonialism and exhibits how those were extra advanced by means of the continuing and ever-more hegemonic presence of English in post-Liberation Korean linguistic existence. It exposes and opinions the ways that the Korean state of affairs is rendered much more advanced through the truth that most of these matters were debated in Korea in an highbrow surroundings ruled by means of deeply conservative and racialized notions of "purity", minjok (ethno-nation) and kugo or "national language" (itself an ideological formation owing largely to Korea's adventure with Japan). Koh sheds mild on themes like: linguistic modernity and the matter of dictionaries and terminology; Korean language purism and the hunt for "pure Korean" at the a part of Korean linguistic nationalists; the beginnings of literary Korean in translation and the query of "translationese" in Korean literature; the query of the limits of "Korean literature" (if an eighteenth-century Korean highbrow writes a piece of fiction in Classical chinese language, is it "Korean literature"?); the vexed factor of the "genetic association" of Korean and the issues with searches for linguistic "bloodlines"; the widespread conflation of language and writing (i.e., of Korean and han'gul) in Korea; the English-as-Official-Language debate in South Korea; the connection among han'gul and chinese language characters; and so on. This e-book can be of worth to these with an curiosity in language and historical past in East Asian in most cases, to boot twentieth-century Korean language, literature, politics and historical past, specifically. The publication should be an remarkable and valuable source for college students of contemporary Korean language and literature.