The social life of K-: (re)circulations of a morpheme

K-pop, K-drama, K-culture, K-fashion, K-wellbeing. These terms, with varying degrees of lexicalization, feature the morpheme K-, frequently treated as a referential stand-in for “Korean”. While K- has been and continues to be used to formally mark diverse genres pertaining to popular culture, more contemporary usages (both in and out of Korea) exhibit a nearly indiscriminate application of the morpheme, suggesting that different semiotic processes may be at work than in years past. This paper traces the evolution of K- and examines its more contemporary usages to analyze the semiotic work it performs in the landscape of South Korean popular culture today. While the historical analysis shows how K- undergoes a process of decontextualization from lexicalized K-pop and K-drama, the analysis of contemporary terms features examples which are far less recognizable and hence, entextualized. Entextualization here refers to the semiotic process by which texts are extracted from one context and then recontextualized in a different one, contributing to its reification as a bounded object (Bauman and Briggs Reference Bauman and Briggs1990; Silverstein and Urban Reference Silverstein and Urban1996). Some contemporary examples (e.g. K-milk tea, K-Wave) show that K- can act as a domestic index, having a Korean-izing effect. Indexical meanings of trendiness, novelty, and cosmopolitanism motivate K-’s over-usage, leading to infelicitous uptakes and producing a second order indexical meaning of uncertainty or anxieties surrounding the longevity of the Korean wave as a global phenomenon (Silverstein Reference Silverstein2003). While certain terms like K-drama and K-beauty remain relatively stable, newer ones like “K-wave” and “K-culture” (which both overlap and importantly diverge from “hallyu”) act as hybridized signifiers which are more or less stable depending on the public. Moreover, while there appear to be many top-down uses (e.g., by corporations, government agencies, etc.) of K- blends in South Korea, not all terms are taken up in a mainstream way.

A stroll along Seoul’s shopping district of Myeongdong, popular among tourists, or perhaps just a few minutes on Korean-language social media will quickly reveal that the semantic field of K- has expanded substantially, becoming (re-)adopted in South Korea in ways that are less frequently attested outside of Korea. To notice K- is to notice English in South Korea—it’s everywhere. Despite its widespread usage, it is perhaps this ubiquity that masks its productivity. In a relatively short period of time, K-’s semantic and indexical meanings have rapidly expanded in the Korean context beyond its origins from Korean popular culture, detaching from a few original lexical items to become a productive derivational morpheme.

Even as K- is frequently treated metalinguistically as a “straightforward” index of Koreanness, its English form interpellates the historically enmeshed (if not fraught) status of English in Korean social life. Harkness (Reference Harkness, Brown and Yeon2015, 500) reminds that “The study, use, and instruction of English in South Korea … serves as a particularly powerful linguistic emblem of South Korean society’s ambivalent stance on multiculturalism, multilingualism, and globalization.” As Park (Reference Park2009, Reference Park2011) and Baik (Reference Baik1995) have argued, English has long had a prominent place in South Korean modern history, beginning with US military occupation, industrialization, and neoliberalism. As Park (Reference Park2009) has shown, English was especially strongly promoted in 1990s South Korea by many top-down governmental agencies and mainstream media outlets. In fact, despite the strongly abiding language ideologies that have dominated and positioned South Korean society as largely monolingual, Park (Reference Park2021) contests the extent to which South Koreans have ever truly been “monolingual” given the sustained presence of English.

In this paper, I show how various tokens of the “same” form K- evolve from earlier linguistic contexts to gain new layers of meaning and cultural significance across newer signifiers. Acting as an index of Koreanness in contemporary cultural production, K- plays an increasingly pivotal role in globally branding (Moore Reference Moore2003; Manning Reference Manning2010) South Korea by attempting to link cultural products to a cosmopolitan image. The analysis delves into the historical and cultural evolution of the morpheme K-, tracing its detachment from its origins in K-pop and its more recent semantic extension.

By ethnographically following K- across online and offline spaces, events, and (meta)discourses, this study elucidates how the morpheme emerges as a domestic index of outward-facing possibility—what I call a locally global orientation—that is, attracting globally networked audiences from within and toward Korea. Examining the morpheme’s trajectory underscores language’s pivotal role in shaping the national “brand” of Korea and advancing its interests globally. The data from the project come from just over two years of online and in-person ethnographic fieldwork from the end of 2022 to the beginning of 2025. During the 2023–2024 academic year, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in South Korea, focusing on hybrid popular cultural events in Seoul and Busan. I was especially interested in the target audiences of these events: non-Koreans and/or diasporic Koreans living in South Korea. While initially I was not “looking for” K-, I saw it everywhere at such events, online, and during my time in South Korea more broadly (and, indeed, in diasporic Korean neighborhoods in Southern California upon returning from fieldwork). I also began paying attention to how the morpheme K- was also the subject of many metadiscourses in both lay and academic contexts.

Historical entextualizations of K

The morpheme K- is rarely “just” a stand-in for “Korean” but is frequently subject to referentialist language ideologies that treat it as such. The semiotic work that K- is doing—such as expanding the indexical meaning of existing lexical items—is masked precisely by these referentialist ideologies that render K- obvious: it is hidden in plain sight. When K- changes the surface form of a lexical item (e.g. wellbeing to K-wellbeing), the resulting product is frequently the subject of metadiscursive commentary. The tone of these range from humorous to cynical and can be attested, for instance, on social media or in diasporic linguistic landscapes (say, in the form of store signs). Even as such stances potentiate new meanings for K-, the morpheme is frequently discussed as a straightforward index of all things Korean.

Many of the metadiscourses surrounding K- locate its emergence with the lexicalization of K-pop in non-Korean media. For instance, K-pop scholar Sukyoung Kim attributes the emergence of K-pop as a term to Hong Kong media in 1995, modeled after J-pop which became popularized in Asia in the late 1980s (Kim Reference Kim2016). Another early appearance of K-pop was a 1999 Billboard magazine article titled “S. Korea To Allow Some Japanese Live Acts” written by Cho Hyun-Jin, who was a Billboard correspondent in South Korea in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Herman Reference Herman2019). According to Cho, his inclusion of K-pop to act as the English equivalent of Korean gayo “popular music” was a decision made in collaboration with his editor and was a lexical choice inspired by K League, the name of the professional soccer league in South Korea. While Cho denies the influence of the lexical term J-pop, then in circulation, this historical moment of lexical translation from gayo to K-pop exposes primarily US readers of Billboard to the latter term. Importantly, then, K-pop is not coined “at home” by Korean media but by foreign media who aim to introduce a foreign product to its local audience.

The lexical coinage of K-pop also identified the pan-Asian circulation of a seemingly autochthonous Korean genre throughout global media networks. K-pop scholars have pointed out how the very label K-pop comes to signify an external gaze given that historically, the K-pop industry has produced music explicitly for overseas consumption (Shin Reference Shin2009; Kim Reference Kim2018). This global circulation of K-pop—including the non-Korean influences of both K-pop music production and consumption—explains why other languages and especially English have always been a main feature of K-pop music: it has always been a locally and globally promoted genre. In sum, K-pop is a name for pop music coming out of Korea, designated so by non-Korean consumers and media. In fact, in Korea, other terms for K-pop have long been in circulation (e.g. ga-yo “popular music” and a-i-dol eum-ak “idol music”). Furthermore, the emergence and immense popularity of K-pop as a lexical item with the global product it signifies has had far-reaching and perhaps unintended effects that could have foreseen its current productive entextualization: musical genres not considered to be pop music in the South Korean context (such as hip hop, soul music, and R&B) become labeled “K-pop” in many contexts outside of Korea. That is, K-pop is overextended to mean just popular music coming out of Korea. When various musical styles and genres are classified as K-pop, genre differences are de-emphasized, if not outright homogenized, while all become marked as culturally Korean. As my examples show later, this is precisely one of the key functions of K-: a homogenizing, Koreanizing effect.

Even for people with limited interaction with Korean content, K- has become a recognizable metonym for Korean culture (Khedun-Burgoine and Kiaer Reference Khedun-Burgoine and Kiaer2022). In a notable case of the regimentation of Korean-derived words into English, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) announced the adoption of 26 words into English in 2021, including the morpheme K- (Salazar Reference Salazar2021; see Chun this issue). Figure 1 comes from Khedun-Burgoine and Kiaer (Reference Khedun-Burgoine and Kiaer2022), where they report the OED’s own claims that morpheme K- is first documented in 1999 (see column “Year of First Cited Documentation”), conspicuously the same year that K-pop is said to be first documented. (K-pop was adopted into the OED in 2016). Indeed, the very example used under the listing of K- is precisely K-pop (Figure 2).

Figure 1.

Twenty-six words of Korean origin added to the Oxford English Dictionary, from Khedun-Burgoine and Kiaer (Reference Khedun-Burgoine and Kiaer2022).

Figure 2.

K-pop recorded in Oxford English Dictionary as earliest attestation of morpheme K- in 1999.

The relationship between the morpheme K-’s first alleged citation in 1999 and much later 2021 adoption into the OED begs the question: given the highly entextualized nature of K- today, why is it only adopted in 2021? Put differently, if the morpheme is said to be attested as early as 1999 but is not adopted into the OED until 2021, what was it doing for 22 years? The characterization of K-’s first attestation as being in 1999 is somewhat misleading since it collapses the difference between K- as part of a lexical item (e.g. K-pop) and its current form as a highly productive morpheme whose boundedness is up for debate given the metadiscourses that treat it as a free morpheme (as well as the OED’s own categorization of it as a “word”). Additional clues abound within the OED’s own list of Korean-derived items: K-drama’s first attestation is listed as 2002. The examples of K-pop and K-drama’s earliest appearances suggest that the productivity of K- does not precede the global circulation of these lexical items. Put differently, K- likely “detaches” (i.e., is decontextualized) from its original usage in K-pop and K-drama, rather than acting as a free morpheme from the beginning. While the OED entry (as well as my metadiscourse example below) illustrates that K- can be discussed as a free morpheme, its dominant form and function remain that of a prefix, acting as a toponymic nominal expression to the lexical item to which it attaches. I am suggesting that the metawareness of K-pop and K-drama tokens and their wide-reaching circulation for over two decades have generated metawareness and the eventual recontextualization of morpheme K- in other contexts, producing newer lexical items (e.g. K-fashion, K-food K-milk tea, etc.).

K- as domestic index

What was once a morpheme that originally signified “of/from Korea” (in the case of Hong Kongese media’s early usage) has undergone indexical shifts with its increasingly localized usages in the Korean context. My ethnographic work on K- in Seoul reveals that it is found in diverse environments and frequently gets used in ways that reify its referential dimensions. More specifically, referential ideologies are attested and reproduced when K- is used in ways that suggest a transparent semantic interpretation (that is, K- = “Korean”). This is especially noticeable in low-frequency tokens that are thus not as lexicalized and hence marked (e.g. “K-homophobia”).

In the following example, K- is used to index something domestic, something traditionally (and hence, authentically) Korean (Figure 3). Here, K- is recruited to promote new flavors of bubble tea. Also known as boba milk tea, pearl milk tea, or simply boba for short (named after the chewy tapioca balls that are added to the tea), this beverage was invented in Taichung, Taiwan in the 1980s and became popular in Japan and Hong Kong in the early 1990s. It became popularized among young East Asian diasporic communities in the US in the late 1990s, eventually becoming a symbol of Asian American identity (Zhang Reference Zhang2019). This image (taken in May 2023) comes from inside one of the popular bubble tea brand Gong Cha’s stores in the Gangnam District of Seoul. Gong Cha is a well-known Taiwanese bubble tea company that has many chain stores in South Korea. Importantly, in 2017, 70 percent of ownership was sold to the owner of Gong Cha Korea, the parent company’s Korea franchisee (Lee and Sang-Heon Reference Lee and Sang-Heon2019).

Figure 3.

K-Milk Tea advertisement by Gong Cha (bubble tea franchise) in Seoul.

Here, K- is combined with 밀크티 mil-keu-ti the transliterated Korean for “milk tea”. The ad is promoting the seasonal flavors sweet corn and yakgwa. Yakgwa is a kind of honey cookie that dates back to the Goryeo Dynasty (918–1392) and was known to be a dessert enjoyed by the ruling class. The idea of re-discovering tradition, alongside the prominent “K-밀크티” has many possible indexical meanings: given that sweet corn and especially yakgwa are traditional snacks that are both less sweet than more modern desserts in Korea, they tend to be associated with elderly Koreans or folks with an “old-fashioned” taste. Bubble tea is a beverage consumed mostly by young clientele. Indeed, many of the middle-aged Koreans I spoke to didn’t know what bubble tea was, while bubble tea stores are ubiquitous by universities and in neighborhoods frequented by young people. The ad, then, invites older consumers to try boba (ostensibly a young person’s drink) in a flavor that is familiar to them, while encouraging their usual clientele to try new-traditional flavors of the milk tea beverage they already love. On the one hand, the morpheme K- is used to invoke tradition by way of its semiotic linkage to traditional Korean desserts. On the other, K- marks novelty or trendiness by entailing existing meanings of K-, given its origins in popular culture. K-, then, has a modernizing and Koreanizing effect; given the origin of bubble tea in Taiwan and its popularity among diasporic Taiwanese, Chinese, and Asian American communities, K-밀크티 suggests a hip Korean version of the Taiwanese classic.

From hallyu to K-wave: K- as linguistic hybridity

During my 2023–2024 fieldwork, I attended three different popular culture-related pop-up events incorporating various aspects of Korean popular culture, though the organizers and target audience were not always clear given the co-presence of genres not readily associated with one another in the Korean context (e.g. cars and coffee). One such event was the K-Wave Festival at Seoul’s National Theater of Korea (Korean: 국립극장) in November 2023, attracting both domestic and international fans, and notably, non-Korean fans living in Korea (Figure 4). I discovered the event through an Instagram post just days before, and upon arrival, I encountered rowdy groups of almost exclusively non-Korean young women who directed me to the correct location, noting that an intermission was underway and that prior RSVPs were necessary. Taking my chances, I entered the venue and was promptly greeted by an attendant who handed me a glossy program and led me through a complex series of hallways to an upper-level seating area. Despite the scale of the event (the prominent venue, a large number of working personnel) and complimentary admission, I counted only roughly 30 attendees near me, though based on crowd reactions, I sensed perhaps double the number in the lower deck seating area closer to the stage.

Figure 4.

Program for K-Wave Festival at the National Theater of Korea in Seoul, November 2023.

The K-Wave Festival was structured as an awards ceremony with two masters of ceremony—one speaking English, the other Korean—who introduced various performance categories with scripted, punchy comments, promptly followed by a polished compilation of video clips from global participants. In the months preceding the event, participants were invited via social media to submit videos showcasing their performances in hybrid musical genres. One such hybrid genre was taekwonmu, a linguistic blend of the Korean martial art taekwondo and 무용 mu-yong “dance”, which fused dance choreography and acrobatics with martial arts elements. Another genre, Joseon pop, combined traditional Korean folk music (gugak) with contemporary pop influences, while a third genre featured contemporary music utilizing traditional Korean percussion instruments. As I elaborate below, these generic innovations contributed to the overall meaning of the K-Wave Festival and reveal newer indexical meanings of K- at such cultural events.

The international scope was evident through submissions from China, Ghana, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, and Singapore, with no entries from Korea itself, suggesting a specific target audience. The competition explicitly recruited participants outside Korea through social media and English-language materials, while the K-pop performances following each award presentation attracted both domestic and international fans within South Korea. As noted above, the K-Wave Festival appeared to attract a significant number of non-Korean attendees, likely already residing in South Korea rather than traveling specifically for this relatively modest-scale event, which featured pop groups that do not have large international fanbases. The fact that hybrid pop events like K-Wave openly recruit non-Korean audiences within Korea represents a shift in consumerist patterns and tactics, which previously focused much more heavily on export-based strategies.

At this event, the morpheme K- was used in at least five distinct combinations: K-Wave Festival, K-Creative Awards, K-Influencer, K-Traditional, and K-Community. None of these terms are commonly used lexical items in the Korean context and suggest attempts at branding the event through the use of K-. A noteworthy aspect of the term K-Wave in this context is its apparent replacement of the term hallyu, still widely in circulation in South Korea today. The use of this morpheme to evoke a shortened form of “Korean Wave” suggests a process of media recirculation; that is to say, that non-Korean-language sources may have influenced the attempted replacement of hallyu. Hallyu, a well-known linguistic blend derived from the two root words han (한/韓) meaning “Korean” and ryu (류/流) meaning “flow” or “wave”, was first popularized by Chinese media in the late 1990s. As it got picked up by Korean media, its usage also arguably began to reify Korean popular culture’s reach as a fact rather than an uneven spread and a far-from-straightforward process. Subsequently, the term Korean Wave gained traction in both lay and academic English-language discourse.

The avoidance of the term hallyu is noteworthy here: K-Wave semiotically distances itself from hallyu’s “foreign” origins and localizes it by foregrounding the English gloss “Korean wave”. Given the ubiquity of K-, the use of it here also entails newer meanings of trendiness while the materiality of English text lends a global, if not cosmopolitan appeal. K-Wave might be interpreted as a rebranding of hallyu. Notably, while the event is titled the “2023 K-Wave Festival” in English, the Korean designation 2023 한국문화 큰잔치 (translit. han-kuk mun-hwa keun jan-chi) translates to “2023 Korean Culture Festival” (emphasis mine), thereby interpellating different audiences (Figure 5). Given the nature of the event, the Korean name suggests that pop culture is Korean culture whereas the English name encourages a trendier, more contemporary reading. Moreover, “K-Wave” apparently goes beyond expected hallyu genres (of K-pop, K-drama, food, film, etc.) by explicitly incorporating hybrid genres that already rely on indexical meanings associated with a traditional South Korea—genres like folk singing (gugak), taekwondo, and percussion music.

Figure 5.

Different names for K-Wave Festival in English and Korean.

K- as self-evident and aspirational: the K-influencer

One of K-Wave Festival’s recruitment strategies and a well-worn tactic of those looking to sustain the “Korean wave” in general (that is, its trendiness) is capitalizing on the accessible nature of social media as well as the aspirational desires of people in their local contexts by invoking Korea as a powerful signifier (Yoo Reference Yoo2023). For instance, a strategy used to recruit participants and submissions for K-Wave Festival is through cross-platform engagement on all major social media platforms. Participants of K-Wave Festival submit their videos using their own social media platforms and specific hashtags to become eligible for the competition, creating a cross-platform, cross-channel network. Participants for the 2023 K-Wave Festival learn about the event primarily through social media. Information about the K-Wave Festival is promoted by Korea.net, the official web portal of the South Korean government designed to share information about South Korea internationally (Yoon Reference Yoon2019). As of 2024, it offers content in 10 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, and Indonesian, and is run by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, whose presence is seen in nearly all large-scale events related to popular culture in South Korea. Korea.net also has a YouTube channel which serves as the main site for potential participants to learn about each performance genre and to watch tutorial videos prior to submitting their own videos.

Korea.net serves not only as an informational resource but also as a one-stop hub to find other channels and outlets for aspiring content creators. Korea.net has three other YouTube channels that feature overlapping content. One such channel, “K-influencers” is dedicated to the formation and recruitment of what they call “K-Youtubers” through informative videos that socialize viewers on how to become a successful online creator of Korea-related content (also conspicuously called “K-content”). The term influencer has emerged with the rise of social media personalities, whose careers are predominantly shaped by their online presence and ability to attract large followings. YouTubers represent a specific subset of influencers, characterized by their ability to command attention primarily on YouTube but increasingly across multiple platforms. The desire to become an influencer can be motivated by financial benefits, such as monetization of videos based on high content engagement as well as sponsorship opportunities. Generating online content in this way is often accompanied by the potential for fame, recognition, and other forms of social capital. Besides the possibility of fame, K.net’s global competitions promise rewards such as opportunities for all-expenses-paid trips to South Korea, while requiring minimal investment or maintenance from Korea.net.

The K-influencers YouTube channel seems to recruit individuals who aspire to gain recognition within an online ecosystem through their engagement and expertise in Korean popular culture. One of Korea.net’s YouTube channel descriptions reads, “If you are a K-influencer or wish to be one, make sure to keep an eye on our content!.” Given the diversity of topics covered on the channel, the K- here marks not only popular culture, but anything associated with Korea. Indeed, with K-, anything could become commodified as popular culture, as seen in one of the categories for the K-Wave Festival, “K-food”, whose Korean equivalent is simply “Korean food (cuisine)”. In this context, a K-influencer is anyone who engages with and promotes Korean culture—popular or otherwise—through social media platforms, but tautologically, it also refers to someone who aspires to be an influencer, given that the channel is dedicated, in large part, to recruiting and socializing viewers who “wish to be” one.

Despite being a Korea-sponsored account, K.net features mostly English speakers and provides translations and subtitles on all its videos. Given the predominance of English throughout, K.net actively recruits non-Koreans through its content. The seemingly unselfconscious use of K-influencers to refer to the community of subscribers and frequent contributors suggests an emergent public separate from a more general K-pop fandom. K.net’s targeting of international audiences to not only consume but to now actively partake in the dissemination of Korean culture represents a marked shift in stakeholders’ tactics for prolonging (or perhaps re-inventing) the Korean wave, a point I discuss further below. K-influencers, here, mark an emergent figure of personhood (Agha Reference Agha2005, Reference Agha2011; Park Reference Park2021), a recognizable social type that becomes linked with a set of indexicals such as behaviors or styles of speaking. Here, a K-influencer represents a young, charismatic, tech-savvy, digital ambassador. K- and influencer take on a symbiotic relationship: their individual indexical meanings of trendiness become laminated onto the linguistic blend K-influencer, as well as the channel that is promulgating its use. This is a bold (re)branding move for the government entity that is the Ministry of Culture.

“Beyond Hangeul”: K- as honey

In October 2023, I attended an event in the southern Korean city of Busan called Beyond Hangeul which included panels of all kinds of experts: professors and researchers, social media influencers and fans. Beyond Hangeul was but one of many hybrid corporate events sponsored by the Ministry of Tourism that featured art and cuisine-related demonstrations and musical performances interspersed with panel discussions on various culture-related topics. The event, which brought together stakeholders from the world of politics, business, marketing, and academia, foregrounded the relationship between Korean popular culture and the globalization of hangeul, the Korean writing system. The inclusion of academic presentations and panel discussions at this otherwise hybrid “pop” event produced authoritative regimentations of discourses vis-à-vis the globalization of the Korean language and its coupling with popular culture. Many of these speakers suggested that the future of Korean popular culture depended on the future of the Korean language—a surprising premise, given that popular and academic discourses have traditionally linked a surge in language learning with an interest in popular culture. The first panel was of particular interest to me because the panelists discussed the relationship between what the moderator called “K-Culture” and the Korean language.

During the Q&A for one largely academic panel, a meta-discourse on the morpheme K- ensued. The panel was comprised of academics—notably all men whose expertise ranged from tourism, popular culture, linguistics, and globalization. The invited moderator was Dr. Gong Yeong-Ik 공영익, associate professor of a major called Hotel and Convention at Busan University of Foreign Studies. He began his opening remarks by informing the audience members that he was invited as discussant given his research expertise in “K-Culture” (저는 사실은 케이 컬처의 전문가 입니다). (Indeed, I frequently heard the seemingly stable, nonchalant, and ubiquitous use of “K-Culture” during my time in Korea.) One of the panelists Dr. Alok K. Roy, who discusses the K- morpheme below, is Professor Emeritus at Busan University of Foreign Studies, and concurrently serves as Secretary General of the Busan Foundation for International Cooperation (BFIC), a center providing services to foreign residents and naturalized citizens. Dr. Roy was born in India and is a naturalized Korean citizen with dual citizenship, so he is asked to offer his expertise as someone who has lived in South Korea since the eighties and has witnessed its development for four decades. Thus, Roy represents a stakeholder who traverses the realms of academia, politics, and economics. He also typifies a oegugin (외국인 “foreigner”) who moved to Korea, learned the language, and can speak to both South Korea’s internal economic development and to global trends, including the shifting interests of foreigners. Given his institutional role, he is also knowledgeable about and invested in the branding of Korea and specifically the city of Busan. In the following transcript, Gong asks Roy about the continued promotion of Korea globally.

(1) Gong Yeong-Ik: 한류 흐름을 타고 한국과 한국 문화를 세계에 알릴 수 있는 좋은 방법이 있을까요?

Is there a good way to promote Korea and its culture to the world by riding the wave of hallyu?

(2) Alok Roy: 나는 사실 이제 어떤 시대가 왔냐 하면은 언어라는 게 마음의 흐름으로 쭉 가고 있다는 걸 난 보고 있어요. 그러니까 거기에 케이 컬처가 큰 역할을, 케이 팝이 더 크게 역할을 했고 어디까지 됐냐고 하면은 이제 케이가 들어가면은 그것이 성공이다.

The way I see it, we’re now in an era in which language is becoming more of a mood/feeling. So in that vein, K-culture has had a huge impact and K-pop an even greater impact. It’s gotten to the point that it’s now considered a success if K- is in it.

(3) 그런 어떤 비즈니스 용어가 된, 되기도 했어요. 그, 그게 무슨 말이냐면은 이 좋은 것이 있으면은 사람이 거기에 끌게 돼있다라는 [건/것?]..예를 들면은 꿀이 있으면은 꿀벌 들어오게 되, 되있다는 얘기죠. 한국이 지금 선진화의 그 과정을 좀 겪고 있다는 얘기죠.

It [K-] has become something of a business term. What that means is, if there is something good, people will be attracted to it … [because] For example, if there is honey, it will attract bees. It is an indication that Korea is now in the process of becoming an advanced country, to a certain degree.

(4) 그렇게 하니까 한글이나 한국보다는 보급하는 게 특별히 [이 일해야 된다] 그게 아니라 알아야 될 게 있다면 시간에도 날개가 있다. 날개를 펼쳐라, 그 말을 내가 하고 싶다는 얘기죠.

I’m not saying you need to focus on disseminating the Korean language or Korea. If there’s one thing you need to know, it’s that time has wings. Spread your wings, that’s what I want to say.

Gong’s self-introduction as a “K-Culture expert” and the formulation of his question reveal a number of shared goals and premises framing this conversation. His lack of self-consciousness when using the term “K-Culture” solidified a point I came to know during my time in South Korea: that K-Culture is a lexicalized umbrella term that refers broadly to Korean popular culture, though it may now include cuisine and other hybrid genres like the ones underscored in the K-Wave event described above. The use of hallyu in Gong’s question suggests its interchangeability with K-Culture in the Korean context (the former is still used widely in lay and academic discourses). “A good way to promote Korea and its culture” (한국과 한국 문화를 세계에 알릴 수 있는 좋은 방법”) reveals a present preoccupation with the nationalist promotion of Korea-as-trend. Academics were invited to take part in what echoed a branding strategy meeting (Moore Reference Moore2003) vis-à-vis the future of the Korean language. The idea of riding a wave introduces a second order indexical meaning of insecurity: the trendiness of hallyu products signifies its timeliness and hence, ephemerality. If hallyu is bound to end, the question reveals a preoccupation with making the most of the present wave if not prolonging it altogether.

Roy’s response (para. 2) introduces a metadiscourse on language and the K- morpheme in particular. Unlike many other speakers from the event, Roy does not make a case for the dissemination of the Korean language as a global export. Instead, he argues that language is becoming more of a mood or feeling in today’s modern era, underscoring its affective potential rather than its referential dimensions. It’s important to note here that 마음의 흐름으로 (which I have glossed as “becoming a mood/feeling”) is not a commonly attested collocation in Korean, likely evidencing Roy’s status as an L2 speaker and/or the first speaker’s influence on his lexical choice. In addition to “mood/feeling”, other glosses might include “the flow of the heart/spirit” or even a more individualizing meaning of “how one feels”. It is salient here that he uses a universalizing eon-eo “language”, not a specific code han-guk-eo “Korean language” or hangeul “Korean writing system”. The idea of language becoming a “mood/feeling” suggests its efficacy lies in its nebulous and non-descript nature echoing marketing language seen in Korean tourism websites, as attested in Moore’s (Reference Moore2003) ethnographic findings on language used in brand strategy meetings. The idea of language as a branding technology is marketing a lifestyle: language’s potential to act as a mood/feeling both presupposes neoliberal values and points to an emergent figure of personhood: the globally networked (and generally young) digital ambassador who is recruited to create and disseminate content vis-à-vis Korean popular culture.

The idea of language-as-mood imbues K- with the “feel of Korea”, that is, a qualic potential (see also Inouchi’s in this volume on emergent signs of a soft Korean femininity among young Japanese women). Roy follows the language-as-mood analogy with “K-Culture” and “K-pop” as evidence for his argument that language can effectively be used to market Korea. Roy’s claim that “it’s now considered a success if K- is in it” suggests that K- presupposes success through global recognition of already-lexicalized forms (“K-pop” and “K-Culture”). In a way, he’s making the connection between the morpheme’s popularity and these genres that the OED obscures. That is, K- acts as an index of quality, and hence, potentiates future success. Specifically, K-culture and K-pop’s global recognition is cited as evidence for K-’s potential to generate even greater success. The circularity of the argument is never questioned; language (K-) promises material actualization (success), but its referent (quality) remains within the realm of potential. Recall that the K- in K-influencer indexed both an established content creator of Korean culture and anyone aspiring to be one (according to K.net’s own description). Therein lies the indexical potential of K-: it is both self-evident and aspirational. It is precisely the intertextual relationship between K- as an index of quality (by its original linkage to globalized genres) and also an index of potential (exemplified by its extreme productivity) that generates and exacerbates anxieties surrounding its effectiveness and longevity.

Roy’s metadiscourse explicitly links K- to the world of business, likening it to “honey” that attracts bees, analogous to consumers (para. 3). The metaphor suggests an organic, if not inevitable, process whereby anything with K- becomes successful. He indicates that overt dissemination of Korean cultural products is no longer needed for cultural promotion (para. 4), representing a shift from earlier years when Korean language was explicitly promoted abroad through cultural centers. That is, cultural dissemination can happen organically through an index of quality, K-. Roy cites globalized products like K-pop and K-Culture as evidence of K-’s effectiveness in branding Korea’s economic positioning, with its popularity and ubiquity cited as markers of economic progress. Even as he likens K- to a “business term” that evokes a mood (itself vague), he acknowledges its uncertain effectiveness and longevity through the statement “time has wings” (akin to the English idiom “Strike while the iron is hot”), suggesting both opportunity and urgency. As a stakeholder in the branding of Korea and Busan, Roy presents K- as an index of quality, while simultaneously expressing broader anxieties shared by many stakeholders about the Korean wave’s longevity. Though K- appears to have magical powers to attract consumers, Roy’s imperative to “spread your wings” reveals that this attraction is not entirely “natural” or “inevitable”—some intervention is indeed required.

The shifting semiotics of K

The morpheme K- acts as more than a simple linguistic marker of national identity. Its entextualized iterations take on new meanings and functions, thereby disrupting straightforward notions of transnational circulation. Its newer attestations reveal a complex interplay of top-down cultural branding, local linguistic innovation, and transnational flows of communication. Across disparate contexts from K-밀크티 (K-milk tea) to K-influencer, K- is used to negotiate tradition and modernity, local specificity, and global appeal. Metadiscourses surrounding K- reveal both its productivity and unstable usage. Stakeholders’ tautological treatment of K- as an established index of quality (attached to Korea’s economic progress) and simultaneously as language that requires constant circulation reveal the anxieties surrounding the morpheme’s longevity.

The morpheme’s plasticity also indexes the shifting audiences for Korean popular culture, at least domestically. Korean popular culture, historically a key cultural export, has increasingly turned “inward”; that is, greater attention is paid to attracting global fans living within Korea as well as those networked virtually to partake in cultural production. I referred to this function of K- to draw in an international audience toward and within South Korea the locally global orienting force K-’s new usages. I suggested that K-influencers emerge as paradigmatic figures in this landscape: digital ambassadors who simultaneously embody and transform national narratives through linguistic and performative practices.

This study advances understanding of how a single morpheme can undergo rapid semantic and indexical expansion, detaching from lexicalized forms (K-pop, K-drama) to become a productive derivational morpheme with unstable, context-dependent meanings. By tracing the entextualization of morpheme K-, this work shows how circulating linguistic forms gain new semiotic lives across contexts. I suggested that newer instantiations of K- represent a shift in stakeholder strategies for advertising or prolonging the popularity of Korean genres: these uses of K- index a shift in Korean popular cultural branding from the fully export-based focus of years past (that is, from one context to another) to a more locally global orientation whereby globally networked audiences are recruited to be cultural and national consumers and experts. Methodologically, the ethnographic tracking of K- across online and offline spaces offers a model for studying linguistic circulation. By attending to the social life of K- in various synchronous contexts, this study underscores the rapidly shifting terrain of popular culture in contemporary South Korea, the anxieties produced in the wake of such shifts, and the use of language in branding popular culture in the service of global geopolitical interests.