Hofstede’s Dimensions of National Cultures Revisited: A Case Study of South Korea’s Culture Elena BUJA Transilvania University of Braşov (Romania) Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics elena_buja@yahoo.com Abstract. In about thirty-fve years since the frst publication of Hofstede’s (1991) study on the dimensions of national cultures, people all over the world have evolved in various directions and to various extents due to the phenomenon known as globalization. The present paper aims to investigate whether within this time span South Korea, a technically and economically developed country, whose way of life is strongly infuenced by Confucianism, has complied with or resisted this phenomenon. The data that will be discussed have been collected from a Korean best seller (Shin’s Please Look After Mom, 2012) that approximately covers the period in which Hofstede conducted his investigations on national cultures. Hopefully the fndings will indicate that the deeply rooted values have remained almost the same, while the outer layers of culture (such as the symbols or rituals, also known as ‘practices’) have changed due to the infuences exerted by the other important economic and cultural powers of the world (such as Japan, the United States or some of the European countries) Korea has come in touch with. Keywords: cultural dimensions, changes, values, practices, Korean culture. 1. Introduction: Why Korea? One may wonder why from all the countries in the world the one I have chosen to focus on in this paper is South Korea. There are several reasons for this choice. First, I have been living in this country for half a year now and in this short period of time I have experienced mixed feelings about it. When I arrived on the Global Campus of Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, I thought I had been dropped in a deserted village: no shops, no restaurants, no huge buildings, just a couple of low, though modern-looking dormitories and school buildings scattered along the road that is winding through a forest. This was not at all what I had expected when I left Romania. But soon I came to visit the capital city, Seoul, which is breathtaking: the very sophisticated skyscrapers, the modern offce buildings, ActA UniversitAtis sApientiAe, philologicA, 8, 1 (2016) 169–182 DOI: 10.1515/ausp-2016-0012