Korean Wave in World Englishes
This book examines the linguistic impact of the Korean Wave on World Englishes, demonstrating that the K-Wave is not only a phenomenon of popular culture, but also language.
The "Korean Wave" is a neologism that was coined during the 1990s that includes K-pop, K-dramas, K-film, K-food, and K-beauty, and in recent years it has peaked in global popularity. This book intends to show how social media phenomena have facilitated the growth of Korea’s cultural influence globally and enabled a number of Korean origin words to settle in varieties of Englishes. This in turn has globalised Korean origin words and revolutionised the English language through an active and collaborative process of lexical migration. Korean origin words such as oppa (older brother) are no longer bound solely to Korean-speaking contexts. The study focuses primarily on media content, particularly social media, corroborated by case studies to examine how linguistic innovation has been engendered by the Korean Wave.
Suitable for students and researchers of Korean linguistics, Korean culture, Korean popular culture, and translation studies, this book is the first detailed study of the global linguistic impact of the Korean Wave.
Brittany Khedun-Burgoine is a DPhil student in Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford, UK. She has presented her research at several international conferences including the International Association for World Englishes, the Asian Association for Lexicography, and the Sociolinguistics Symposium. Her current research explores the global anglophone K-Pop fandom’s creative use of Korean words to create new and individualised meanings.
Jieun Kiaer is a Professor of Korean Linguistics at the University of Oxford, UK. She is the Series Editor for Routledge Studies in East Asian Translation and publishes widely on lexical interaction between East Asian languages and Englishes. Her recent publications include The History of English Loanwords in Korean (2014), Translingual Words: An East Asian Lexical Encounter with English (Routledge 2018), and Delicious Words: East Asian Food Words in English (Routledge 2020). She is also acting as a Korean consultant for the Oxford English Dictionary (2021–).