Korean language thrown a lifeline

Korean, a language with few students but high priority in government rhetoric, has been given a modest injection of money.

A project led by Gi-Hyun Shin at the Australian University of NSW has won $485,000 over two years under the National Asian Languages and Studies in Schools Program.

But in a sign of Korean's vulnerability, one of the universities that put together the successful proposal for NALSSP money has decided to abandon the language. From next year, Curtin University of Technology will take no new students.

Korean is one of four priority languages under this program, which has $62.4 million to spend over fouryears. Dr Shin said the money would allow work including teacher training and the development of materials on Korean culture for non-language subjects in schools, such as social sciences.

"What we're trying to do is to get high school students informed about what is happening in Korea at the moment and when they get to university they might be interested in signing up (for Korean)," he said.

Dr Shin said that despite the rapid rise of South Korea as a trading partner, the country and its culture had yet to create "any particular image" in Australia, which shared its status as a middle power. Among the priority languages, Korean lacked the strong profile of Chinese or Japanese.

This year Curtin decided it had too few students to maintain its Korean program, according to Will Christensen, head of the school of social sciences and Asian languages.