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By Hwang Ga-yeon
Hangul Day on Monday was a festive finish to the Chuseok holiday season that continued for almost 10 days.
Korea's biggest internet portal Naver decorated its homepage with Korean logo art. Jeju Airline made an in-flight announcement in pure Korean free of foreign words, with the National Institute of Korean Language providing the script.
The focus on Korean, including a word quiz on Jeju Airline's Facebook page, will continue until the end of this month.
But despite such efforts, many believe that the Korean language used in everyday speech is being neglected and destroyed.
"Konglish,", a combination of Korean and English, often changes the original meanings of English words.
Konglish terms such as "hand phone (cell phone)," "eye-shopping (window shopping)," "handle (steering wheel)" and "concent (wall socket)" rather confuse Korean and English speakers.
Korea has been overusing English based on a fantasy. Some Koreans blindly believe English offers a fresh, elegant and exquisite image, and therefore use random words in various fields such as food, fashion and media.
These people refuse to use Korean, even when there is a proper and better substitute in our own language.
For instance, a well-known live show from MBC was literally titled "My Little Television" in 2015. The Korea Communications Standards Commission sent a warning based on the Broadcast Act about overuse of borrowed words.
Some internet users describe this use of English as "Vogue language" because Vogue magazine aims at the snobbish end of the fashion market.
The problem does not stop with commerce. Overuse and misuse of English also stretches to political fields.
The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, which is in charge of linguistic policy, was ironically in trouble for abusing foreign language and loan words. About 36.9% of its press release exceedingly used English or Chinese letters, the National Institute of the Korean Language pointed out.
The National Assembly's legislation and the Korea Administration's enforcement ordinance also suffer from sophisticated Chinese letter overload that regular citizens can hardly comprehend and which could be simply refined.
In addition, loads of official "festivals" ― instead of the Korean word "chook-jae" ― such as Hackerthon (Hacker+Marathon) and MIC (Meet, Incentive Travel, Convention, Exhibition) from Seoul, MAKE-CAR-THON from the Seoul Business Agency, Upcycling exhibition from the Seoul Metropolitan Library have a hard time convincing citizens to join when it is hard to understand what they stand for.
There has been an attempt to conserve Korean language. Insa-dong Street in Seoul allows signs only in Hangul, making it a tourist attraction.
But it is still odd that Korean signs are rare in Korea ― from public institutions to everyday language.
