elsewhere in Asia. The revelation is this: the word foreigner, a word that is used extremely frequently in Korean English speakers, is perceived as offensive in most cases for most native English speakers. Don’t get me wrong, there are many positives in the way people from overseas are treated here in the Land of the Morning Calm. But it is a disservice to my students and to the translators I work with not to let them know, as clearly as possible, that those who continue to overuse and misuse the word foreigner in the wrong contexts are damaging the message they send, the communication process overall, and probably losing business. I think it’s probably connected to Anglo-American culture. We have that idea of the melting pot, or at least the salad bowl, where immigrants from all nations, from every ethnic group, from any race, can come together to form “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” to borrow a line from the American pledge of allegiance. It may be a fantasy, but in the United States, Canada and Great Britain, along with a few other countries, it’s a fantasy that is closer to reality than perhaps anywhere else. The current president of the USA is a powerful message that there might be more than a fantasy involved – that your racial or ethnic background doesn’t matter to become part of the American “us.” Linguistic anthropologist Michael Agar, who coined the term languaculture to point out the interconnectedness of both language and culture, has written for decades about the connections between the two, often by looking at what he refers to as “rich points.” Agar defines rich points as “those surprises, those departures from an outsider’s expectations that signal a difference between (languaculture) 1 and (languaculture) 2 and give direction to subsequent learning.” The difference in a Korean English speaker’s mind and a Western (possibly native) English speaker’s mind when they encounter the word foreigner seems to be one of Agar’s rich points. Clearly, there is a different understanding of the connotations, the emotional meaning, of the word foreigner to someone from the
elsewhere in Asia. The revelation is this: the word foreigner, a word that is used extremely frequently in Korean English speakers, is perceived as offensive in most cases for most native English speakers. Don’t get me wrong, there are many positives in the way people from overseas are treated here in the Land of the Morning Calm. But it is a disservice to my students and to the translators I work with not to let them know, as clearly as possible, that those who continue to overuse and misuse the word foreigner in the wrong contexts are damaging the message they send, the communication process overall, and probably losing business. I think it’s probably connected to Anglo-American culture. We have that idea of the melting pot, or at least the salad bowl, where immigrants from all nations, from every ethnic group, from any race, can come together to form “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” to borrow a line from the American pledge of allegiance. It may be a fantasy, but in the United States, Canada and Great Britain, along with a few other countries, it’s a fantasy that is closer to reality than perhaps anywhere else. The current president of the USA is a powerful message that there might be more than a fantasy involved – that your racial or ethnic background doesn’t matter to become part of the American “us.” Linguistic anthropologist Michael Agar, who coined the term languaculture to point out the interconnectedness of both language and culture, has written for decades about the connections between the two, often by looking at what he refers to as “rich points.” Agar defines rich points as “those surprises, those departures from an outsider’s expectations that signal a difference between (languaculture) 1 and (languaculture) 2 and give direction to subsequent learning.” The difference in a Korean English speaker’s mind and a Western (possibly native) English speaker’s mind when they encounter the word foreigner seems to be one of Agar’s rich points. Clearly, there is a different understanding of the connotations, the emotional meaning, of the word foreigner to someone from the