Now that Korea has gained cultural power to some extent than before, I have been thinking about what causes significant differences from other cultures while they all affect each other organically. One of the factors I came up with was language. If I consider a country using mainly one language that is not used by other countries, it is most likely that it can develop its own culture since it is not easily dissolved or absorbed into cultures of other languages, ethnicities, etc. Therefore, having a unique language is a reliable foundation for a culture to flourish. On the other hand, countries using the same language or sharing the same root of language, namely language family, might have some cultural aspects in common. Even in a smaller scope, for example, small districts within a country have their own dialects that showcase cultural differences. In this sense, I thought it would be interesting if I make a research on a comparison between Korean and other languages and also cultural aspects that appeared in Korean dialects. Personally, back to the original curiosity, I can develop this thought into many ways. For example, I am very interested in the boundary of culture (What factor separates culture from others?) and ownership of culture (Is culture something reserved to a specific group of people?), which I believe are important taking the recent trend of Korean culture, becoming global, into consideration.
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Learning about the extent that language can affect a country's cultural power is an incredibly fresh insight and I hadn't considered the prevalence and necessity of language as a source of political and cultural power, but one could even align language with a currency in that the amount of people internationally that use a language and interact using it affects the extrinsic value of the language. Thank you for your insight!
Very interesting post Jason! I think you bring up a very important point about how language creates cultural autonomy. It makes me think about my country, Ethiopia. For example, because the Oromo people have their own distinct language that shares few similarities with Amharic, for example, a lot of their culture continues to flourish without being dissolved entirely into the hegemonic Amharic culture in Ethiopia.