The Economics of Bloodline: Language, Social Class, and the Racialization of Damunhwa Youth in South Korea

Co-sponsored with the Korea Institute

Since the 2000s, international marriage migration has unsettled Korea’s self-image as an ethnically homogeneous nation and produced a legally distinct “damunhwa” (multicultural) population whose children remain suspended between inclusion and exclusion (J. Shin, 2025). Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic data with six damunhwa youth (2014-2025), this study examines how ideologies of racial and linguistic purity, rooted in Korea’s colonial and Cold War history (G. Shin, 2006), still govern the ways these children are heard and categorized. Using raciolinguistic ideology (Flores & Rosa, 2015), which treats language and racialized embodiment as co-naturalized, I show that listening subjects—peers, teachers, textbooks, and state programs—perceive appearance and speech through one another. Neither “accentless” Korean nor a Korean-passing appearance secures these youths’ authenticity once maternal heritage surfaces, while their mothers’ languages signal insufficient assimilation and claims to prestigious English are dismissed when the speaking body is not White. This co-naturalization runs through social class: a mother’s country of origin supplies the idiom in which race is assigned, such that damunhwa connotes poverty while honhyeol evokes European descent. Participants respond by concealing heritage-language proficiency or performing unmarked Koreanness. Korea’s case reveals how racial/ethnic hierarchy can be enacted by a non-white, ethnonationalist majority, complicating theories of race and racism built around whiteness (Ang, Ho, & Yeoh, 2022).