Why are Korean Argentines speaking English?

Abstract More than four and a half million Asian Latin Americans currently reside in South America, Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean. The present study focuses on one of the Latin Asian communities—the Korean community in Argentina, the largest Korean diaspora community in Spanish‐speaking America. The paper examines the linguistic trajectory of Korean Argentines since the arrival of the first Korean immigrants in Buenos Aires in 1965. A notable transformation from one generation to the next, particularly from a monolingual generation to a global and multilingual one, is analyzed through the lens of the super‐diversity framework. The study focuses on English language competence among the younger generation and its contributing factors to the current multilingual status. The data were derived from semistructured interviews with twenty‐three 1.5‐ and second‐generation Korean Argentines from Buenos Aires.