This paper utilizes sociolinguistic theories of social stratification, gravity and cascade models to analyze the usage of English in the linguistic landscape of Korea. Public signs in different regions of Seoul and Korea were photographed and analyzed according to the percentage of English, Korean, Konglish, and Chinese. Labov's gravity model was not found to be accurate, but his social stratification and cascade models were moderately supported. However, in all regions of Seoul and greater Korea, there are domains of English. English is found in the physical domains of main streets, amusement parks and foreign districts, in the product domains of beer, wine and clothing, and in the sociolinguistic domains of modernity, luxury and youth.

Although English is being used all over the planet, its hegemony in Korea is being resisted in the area of Korean Pop songs by incorporating it then transforming it to fit Korean phonetic, syntactic and cultural patterns. This paper examines where English is being borrowed in a quantitative analysis, why English is being borrowed in a functional analysis, and how English is being borrowed in an analysis of 'the verbal art of borrowing.' Where English is being borrowed is heavily in the choruses, intros and titles of songs, but only lightly in the verses. Why it is being borrowed is to talk about sex, love, or for rhythmic vocables. It is also being used as a language of resistance against conservative Korean values. How it is being borrowed is through simple, repetitious and sometimes grammatically incorrect utterances which have been transformed to fit exactly into syntactic and phonetic parallelism described in studies of ethnopoetics. These transformations are verbal art at its finest.

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