The pursuit of multilingualism in transnational educational migration: strategies of linguistic investment among Korean jogi yuhak families in Singapore

Jogi yuhak (early study abroad) has become a prominent educational and linguistic investment strategy for middle-class Korean families to raise their children as global elites, allowing them to attain multilingual competence through transnational educational migration. Singapore, a newly emerging center of jogi yuhak, attracts Korean families with its multilingual language learning context. While jogi yuhak families aim at attaining elite multilingualism, the actual conditions of educational migration in Singapore mean that the students tend to acquire a truncated' multilingual competence, including incomplete competence in their own mother tongue. As the discrepancy between the ideal and the reality of language learning leads to a sense of anxiety among jogi yuhak families, they carefully negotiate their strategies of linguistic investment, varying their investments in different linguistic resources to maximize the effectiveness and profitability of educational migration. Through an analysis of jogi yuhak families' strategic patterns of linguistic investment, this paper demonstrates Korean families' scalar evaluation of the values and functions of languages in their pursuit of multilingualism in English, Mandarin and Korean.