BTS and Languages

With the international rise of K-pop culture, this analysis of BTS and the languages surrounding and related to their music, fans, and media content provides a unique look into how languages are localized, hybridized, and utilized beyond popular entertainment.

Drawing on a wide range of data, the book examines various BTS-related content, from their music to the content generated by both BTS themselves and their fans. Chapters explore key sociolinguistic issues using BTS’s language as data, including their songs, lyrics, tweets, and interviews, and languages of BTS consumers, including fan interactions, reaction videos, commercials, as well as BTS-inspired signs and sounds in public places. With their phenomenal success in the global music market and ever-dominant presence on social media, BTS has inspired scholarly interest in academic fields such as culture and media studies, musicology, sociology, and business marketing, shedding light on effective communication and innovative language use.

As the very first scholarly collection on BTS-related language, this book will be of interest to students and scholars studying language use and communication, including linguistic hybridity, multimodality, translanguaging practices, and multilingual communication.

Joowon Suh is Senior Lecturer and Director of the Korean Language Program in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. She coauthored the KLEAR Integrated Korean Workbook series and revised its Textbook Series 2nd and 3rd editions. She served as the president of the American Association of Teachers of Korean (2018–2021). Her research interests include Korean linguistics and language pedagogy, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics.

Eun Sung Park is Professor in the English Department at Sogang University. Her research interests include SLA, asset-based pedagogy for refugee-background students, and multilingual users’ ELF and translanguaging practices. She has published articles in Applied Linguistics, Journal of Language, Identity, & Education, Language and Intercultural Communication, Language Learning, Language Teaching Research, and TESOL Quarterly, among others. She also coedited English Education at the Tertiary Level in Asia (2017) and authored Instructed SLA: A Practical Guide for Teachers (2020).