My interest in linguistics stems from two experiences — hearing about language differences in Korea as an adolescent and studying linguistics as a graduate student. I am a second-generation Korean-American with family members and friends from many different regions of South Korea. This has facilitated a lot of travel all around the South Korean peninsula since my early childhood. Due to my interactions with people from the different regions, I have grown up understanding that there were significant differences in the ways that people around the country spoke. My father’s side of the family is from the central area of the peninsula. They reside in the Gangwon and Gyeonggi provinces. All, with the exception of one uncle, speak the Seoul dialect — the Korean dialect commonly associated with prestige. My mother’s side of the family, on the other hand, is scattered around the southern end of the peninsula and reside in the Jeolla and Gyeongsang provinces. My relatives from her side of the family definitely use words and pronunciations that my father and other relatives from Seoul do not, and they always compliment me on having learned the “high-class accent” associated with the Seoul dialect as opposed to the “old-fashioned country accent” that they and my mother use.

Thus I learned from an early age that there was an undeniable link between language, place, and perception. I also quickly realized that I wasn’t the only one who noticed this. It seemed that wherever I traveled in Korea, I not only heard variation in the way people spoke, but I also heard people talking animatedly about those differences. People discussed the unusual or distinctive words and accents that they heard, and sometimes they even used these features to guess where the person was from. While discussions like these were normally light-hearted and innocent, some people were more than willing to use their linguistic perceptions to make judgments about who the person was, for good or for bad.

When I studied language variation as a graduate student, I continued to observe the relationship between language and place and identity. I am interested in not only the actual differences in speech (the production approach), but also the everyday perceptions of how people talk (the perception approach). Sometimes these two perspectives give the same information. However, sometimes they differ in very intriguing ways. In my Master’s thesis, I present this interaction using the perception approach; and in my PhD dissertation, I present this interaction using the production approach. Both approaches continue to be equally fascinating to me today as they were in my youth.

I also love language teaching and curriculum designing and have more than a decade of experience teaching, developing, and coordinating language programs in the United States, South Korea, and Mexico. I am very passionate about increasing awareness, appreciation and learning of the world's diverse language varieties and cultures to support a global community. I love working with students. I am energized by their goals, and thrive on understanding their challenges and creating a complete plan to get them where they want to go. It fulfills me to be part of someone's world-view-expanding journey to discovering, learning, and speaking a new language.

Aside from linguistics and language education, I enjoy spending time with family and friends, traveling, doing crosswords, and reading/watching historical (non-)fiction. I am married to Evan Oxenhandler, who is my favorite travel partner and an amazingly talented jazz guitarist and chef.