Konglish

I wanted to try and bring something new but related to the table for my blog post, so I thought I'd latch on to something McCulloch said about English as "linguistically cool" in other languages, and talk about Konglish and the spread of English into South Korea. 

First off, let's define Konglish. Konglish is a slang term referring to English loan words that have been reformatted into a Korean word. Sometimes they mean the same thing they would mean in English, sometimes not. Here's some examples! 

Some, maybe even most, can be somewhat unintuitive to native English speakers. For example, 아이쇼핑, pronounced ai-sho-ping, or "eye shopping," refers to window shopping. 노트북, or "notebook," is referring not to a paper notebook, but to a laptop. One that's becoming more well known is 셀카, or "sel-ka," a mashup of "self" and "camera" that we would call a selfie. 

Konglish is especially interesting because it's "borrowed" English in a sense, but used to create Korean words that are, well, Korean, not just spelled with the Korean alphabet, but words that really only have a certain meaning in Korean. Expats and other multilingual Korean+English speakers often laugh and joke amongst themselves about accidentally saying a Konglish word "in English" and baffling their English-speaking friends and family, such as referring to window a laptop as a notebook or a cell phone as a hand phone in the middle of an English conversation. 

Konglish is a somewhat divisive subject with in Korea, as you might imagine, with people penning articles both praising and criticizing the phenomenon, not unlike how changes to our own language can spark an explosion of opposing opinions. I find the whole thing to be very interesting, and I think it ties in to our ongoing conversation about the ways language is changing, especially since a lot of this has happened because of technology. Koreans are a lot more exposed to the English language thanks to social media (or "SNS" as one would say in Korea!), and loan words are bound to slide in and out. Yes, out as well: the popular term "mukbang," which means, at its broadest, a video in which someone is eating food, is in fact a Korean word, anglicized/romanized for our convenience. I think this also ties in nicely to McCulloch's discussion about other languages on social media, such as Arabic, as well as Harris's ideas about writing—and perhaps to an extent, one could expand that to language?—being a linguistic interplay between multiple conversationalists.