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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 689

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Appropriation and hybridization of English in K-pop: A contact linguistic perspective

Authors: Cho, Young-mee Yu (1); Suh, Joowon (2); Kim, Hae-Young (3)
Submitted by: Kim, Hae-Young (Duke University, United States of America)

The global urban subculture of hip-hop music, which has been embraced as a vehicle of global youth affiliation and refashioning of local identity around the world (Mitchell, 2001; Pennycook, 2007), has become part of the mainstream in South Korea. This has created a fertile ground for language contact and translingual practices, where hybrid English/Korean forms are emerging and developing.  Korean was already borrowing extensively from English since 1945 when South Korea came directly under U.S. hegemony. Our paper focuses on how English is distinctively styled or blended into Korean in popular Korean music (K-pop) and how the unique experimentation contributes to vitality of the Korean language.

Uses of English in K-pop have evolved into complex hybridized forms in the last two decades, coinciding with a surge of popularity of K-pop outside of Korea. Hybridization and localization of English occur at phonological, lexical, and syntactic levels.  Our focus is on phonetic modifications in a corpus of 100 songs by 48 musicians released between 2006 and 2011.  Analysis of the data reveals wide variations, from complete assimilation into Korean phonology to styling authentic ‘native’-like English phonology and usage.  English phonetics as well as syntax are often breached or glossed over intentionally. At the same time, Korean too is phonetically modified to approximate English sounds.  Located in the gamut of dexterous switching and modifications is ‘code-ambiguation’ (Heller, 1998) that would be particularly transparent to the bilingual audience. The degree of phonetic modifications is a strategic decision for performance of identities and indexing group affiliations. 

Adoption of English rhymes in K-pop began as hybrid prosody. With few precedents of rhyme schemes in Korean poetry and with the SOV word order and sentences ending with verb conjugations, creating natural sounding rhyming flow in Korean is a challenge (Kwon, 2011).  Limited experimentation started with superficial rhymes with verb endings or reliance on text repetition and call-and-response styles.  Later experiments better negotiate Korean syntax to incorporate alliteration, internal rhymes and variation of verb endings. We examine the evolution of rhymes in representative Korean hip-hop artists since 1990’s, from periodic attempts by earlier artists such as Seotaiji & Boys (1992-1996), DEUX (1993-1995) and HOT (1996-2001), to more systematic approach by later artists such as  GOD (1999-2005), to consummate examples like Cho-PD’s “Break Free” (1999) whose highly critical social message reverberates through forcefully rhymed words, and Epik High’s “Love, Love, Love” (2007) and DJ Doc’s “Na Irǒn Saramiya” (2010) with internal and multi-word rhymes.

K-pop, with its performativity and reach to trans/national audiences, has been in the forefront of translingual experimentation and innovation for constructing and fashioning novel identities and messages.  We have shown that in this process, not only is English localized and hybridized strategically, but Korean sound and metrical structure is modified deliberately.  We predict that this will have broad and lasting impact on the texture, timber, and rhythm of contemporary Korean.