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How to drop a name: Hybridity, purity, and the K-pop fan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 January 2017

Elaine W. Chun
Elaine W. Chun*
Affiliation:
University of South Carolina
*
Address for correspondence: Elaine W. Chun, Department of English, Welsh Humanities Office Building, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, USAChunE@mailbox.sc.edu
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Abstract

This article explores how fans of K-pop, a mediatized musical genre from South Korea, negotiated the tugs of competing language norms within the transnational context of YouTube. The analysis focuses on interactions that emerged over thirty-three months and across eleven ‘reaction videos’ posted by two English-speaking fans. I analyze the semiotic process by which these two speakers’ utterances of Korean names came to be heard as hybrid by their viewers, how viewers invoked various ideological frames when evaluating these hybridities, and how local language practices and interpretations were shaped as a result. Specifically, I show how a purist ideology of linguistic absolutism, which idealized the ‘correct’ pronunciation of words, was overwhelmingly dominant and how K-pop fans’ contextualizations of forms as hybrid, or their hybridizations, triggered a discursive trajectory: once language was recognized as hybrid, it entered a pathway toward purification, or the contextualization of language as pure. (Hybridity, metalanguage, ideology, new media, mediatization, Korean popular culture)*

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Language in Society , Volume 46 , Special Issue 1: Metapragmatics of Mobility , February 2017 , pp. 57 - 76
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

* I sincerely thank Adrienne Lo, Joseph Park, Angela Reyes, Brett Sherman, Keith Walters, and an anonymous reviewer for questions, challenges, and suggestions that significantly shaped the ideas in this article. For lending their ears and their support, I thank Anne Bezuidenhout, Amanda Dalola, Stan Dubinsky, Sherina Feliciano-Santos, Jennifer Reynolds, Tracey Weldon, students in the Linguistics Program at the University of South Carolina, and members of the Applied Linguistics Department at Portland State University. All remaining errors are my own.

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