The Verbal Art of Borrowing: Analysis of English Borrowing in Korean Pop Songs

Abstract

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.

Teachers' attitudes towards Korean English in South Korea

“…The frequent use of English in public domains in South Korea, in particular, in choruses of Korean pop songs and in TV commercials for brand name products is very common. This phenomenon, involving the popular use of code‐switching and mixing, is described as linguistic hybridisation (Lee ; ) or the verbal art of borrowing (Lawrence ). These studies claim that English is often employed in heterogeneous forms by South Korean youth to assert their self‐identity and challenge dominant representations of authority (Lee ; ; Lawrence ).…”

Modelling the Englishization of vocabulary in contemporary Korean

“…The Englishization of Korean has been examined in a number of early studies which have focused on syntactic features (Baik, ; Jung, ; Jung & Min, ; Pae, ; Seong & Lee, ) and also on phonological features (Ito, Kang, & Kenstowicz, ; Kang, ; Kang, Kenstowicz, & Ito, ; Tranter, , ). Other studies have investigated the sociolinguistic effects of English mixing in advertisements (Ahn, La Ferle, & Lee, ; Lee, , ; Park, ), in K‐pop (Lawrence, ; Lee, , , ), television programs (Ahn, ; Lee, , , ; Park, , ) and movies (Lee, ).…”

The Korean English linguistic landscape

“…The economic and cultural influence of the United States has lead to the increased use of English around the world and it is now the main language of international communication. English vocabulary items such as ‘taxi’, ‘visa’ and ‘exchange’ are used throughout the globe the tourism domain, and other English words are being borrowed into specific languages for specific purposes, such as ‘high hat’ (someone who puts on airs, a snob) in the Philippines (Platt, Weber, and Ho 1984), and ‘hand phone’ (cellular phone) in Japan and Korea (Lawrence 2010).…”

“…They are a ‘mix’ in that elements of English are mixed with elements of the local language, or changed, or recombined with other elements of English in unique ways. (Lawrence 2010: 45)…”