More than Just 'K-Pop': Form(s) and Function(s) of English in South Korea

Sofia Rüdiger (University of Bayreuth)

Hallyu, the Korean wave, is a rather recent phenomenon which refers to the dissemination of Korean culture and language across the world via the media of Korean pop music and Korean TV dramas. What we find reflected in Korean pop culture is the immense influence of English on Korean (see, e.g., Lee 2011 on the use of English lexis in K-pop lyrics). Outside of the realm of pop culture, English remains surprisingly visible in Korean society despite having no official function on the peninsula and not being used for intra-Korean communication. For the Korean context, English has been described, among others, as an “important status symbol, if not a necessary factor for success in life” (Shim & Baik 2004: 182), the “key to upward social mobility” (Park 2009: 37), and even the “language of ultimate importance” (Park 2009: 1).

This talk will, first of all, explain how English became firmly grounded in Korean society by examining the historical and cultural background and relate this to present-day functions and contexts of English use. The result of this fascinating contact situation is twofold: scholars have found influences of English on the Korean language (i.e., the Englishization of Korean; see Shim 1994) and, the opposite process, influences of Korean on the English language as used by South Koreans (i.e., the nativization of English in the Korean context). This nativization process has until recently been neglected in linguistic research, despite the compelling attitudinal and functional background. The second part of this talk will therefore focus on the morpho-syntactic forms of Korean(ized) English based on a corpus of spoken conversational material (Rüdiger 2016, 2017).

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