‘Sejong the Great would turn in his grave!’: South Korean attitudes towards monolingual English signage in public buildings

The newly renovated Seoul Express Bus Terminal, which reopened at the end of 2019, has caused an uproar among the South Korean public. The fact that its ticket booth sign is written only in English – ‘TICKETS’ – was pointed out by one Twitter user (see Figure 1), and the message went viral among internet users. It took only a week or so for the issue to make headlines in Yonhap News – one of the major news agencies in South Korea (hereafter ‘Korea’) that provides news articles and pictures for newspapers, TV networks, and online media. The news article criticised that not only the ticket booth sign but also the sign of a nearby drug store is written exclusively in English – ‘pharmacy’.