Policy Failure and Language Ideologies: Discourses on South Korea’s 2019 Bilingual Special Zone

This study examines the ideological dynamics surrounding South Korea’s 2019 Bilingual Special Zone policy, a short-lived initiative to promote Korean–Chinese bilingual education in selected Seoul districts. It is guided by a single research questions: What underlying ideologies can be identified in the discourses surrounding the 2019 Bilingual Special Zone policy in South Korea? Drawing on a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of policy documents and newspaper articles, this study employs text-mining to identify salient lexical patterns and recurrent framings and applies critical discourse analysis to interpret how these linguistic choices construct particular understandings of language, identity, and security. The findings reveal that while governmental texts frames bilingual education as an instrument of globalization and urban competitiveness media and residents’ discourses often invoked nationalist and securitization ideologies, portraying Chinese language education and Chaoxianzu communities as potential threats. Thus, the policy’s eventual withdrawal is understood as an administrative failure and the outcome of these ideological struggles. By foregrounding how public reactions are shaped by broader linguistic and geopolitical hierarchies, this study contributes to critical language policy scholarship and offers insights for designing more participatory and context-sensitive multilingual policies.