Literary Assessments in Polyscriptal Societies: Chinese Character Literacy in Korea and Japan

Abstract

Literacy studies within both "autonomous" and "ideological" traditions, to use Street’s (1984) terminology, have tended to focus on Western alphabet using societies and assume that literacy, however defined, is an all or nothing matter. Societies in which varieties and degrees of literacy are possible (indeed ordinary) have hitherto largely been ignored. Japan and South Korea are such cases, with separate but functionally interrelated writing systems, used for communicatively disparate purposes, differential mastery of which, consequently, has social and economic repercussions. In these and perhaps similar cases, literacy is, rather than discrete and unitary, always multiplicitous and variable. Different "literacies" entail different social and, some would argue (Unger, 1984 and 1987) cognitive consequences.