As text-based artist born in Germany, I acknowledge the privilege of being able to learn and utilize the Korean language within the German context. Learning a Non-European language allows me to self-critically engage with, against, and beyond the supremacy carried and sustained by “the colonial script and the colonial map with which Europeans have read and navigated the world.”

Following decolonial ideas such as border-thinking, de-linking, and pluriversality this text involves self-reflectively challenging the idealized norms of monolingual language policy I have encountered in the German Korean context. Born white and male, this text is written with a critical acknowledgment of my own complicity and interweaving with (structural and epistemic) violence. 

The process of decolonizing language in the context of linguistic hegemony is an ongoing and intergenerational struggle. This thesis seeks to find answers to the question: “Why does language need to be decolonised at all, and from what?” and adopts findings of my interaction with Korean, as a non-European language, to flag language related practice as power-based social interaction. 

I introduce the theoretical concepts of Languaging, Mono-languaging, Bilanguaging, Trans-languaging, and LangCrit to uncover the coloniality of language. With an emphasis on the performative nature of language I provide literary examples that gravitate towards an understanding of language and identity as social actions rather than abstract entities. By stressing the interrelation of the linguistic theories and decolonial thinking, I aim to think creatively about the implications of linguistic heritage and lingual heterogeneity of communities to examine why language does what it does: to knowledge, to the mind, and to the realities we share. 

Author: René Landspersky