1st Edition
BTS and Languages K-pop Transcending Language and Communication
With the international rise of K-pop culture, this analysis of BTS and the languages surrounding and related to their music, fans, and media content provides a unique look into how languages are localized, hybridized, and utilized beyond popular entertainment.
Drawing on a wide range of data, the book examines various BTS-related content, from their music to the content generated by both BTS themselves and their fans. Chapters explore key sociolinguistic issues using BTS’s language as data, including their songs, lyrics, tweets, and interviews, and languages of BTS consumers, including fan interactions, reaction videos, commercials, as well as BTS-inspired signs and sounds in public places. With their phenomenal success in the global music market and ever-dominant presence on social media, BTS has inspired scholarly interest in academic fields such as culture and media studies, musicology, sociology, and business marketing, shedding light on effective communication and innovative language use.
As the very first scholarly collection on BTS-related language, this book will be of interest to students and scholars studying language use and communication, including linguistic hybridity, multimodality, translanguaging practices, and multilingual communication.
Introduction: Contextualizing BTS
JOOWON SUH AND EUN SUNG PARK
PART I: Songs and Lyrics
1 “Hip-hop Boy Band” That Resonates: How BTS Lyrics Comfort and Empower
MI-YOUNG KIM
2 I Got You/You Got Me: Transitivity Analysis of BTS Fan and Healing Songs
MINA LEE AND KYUNGHWA LEE
3 Corpus-Driven Genre Analysis of BTS Lyrics
YU KYOUNG SHIN AND LINLIN YU
PART II: Multilingual Communication
4 “I Purple You”: BTS’s ELF and Translanguaging Practices
EUN SUNG PARK
5 BTS’s and ARMYs’ Dynamic Translanguaging on Social Media
HYEJEONG AHN, JIEUN KIAER, AND SIMON BARNES-SADLER
6 Creative Disruption of Linguistic Hierarchy: “Brilliant, Tremendous, and Sensational” Multilingual Communication
SHIM LEW
7 Cultivating Uri Community: Translanguaging Practice in Japanese Fan Communities
WONA LEE AND HIROKO SUGAWARA
PART III: Multimodal Practices and Engagement
8 BTS Reaction Videos as Third Space for Identity Negotiation
JOOWON SUH
9 Making Space: Mapping the Power of BTS Pop-up Markets
MELODY LYNCH-KIMERY
10 “Do You Want to Listen to My Seoul?”: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of BTS Advertisements
HAKYOON LEE
Epilogue: Future Directions of K-pop
DAL YONG JIN
Biography
Joowon Suh is Senior Lecturer and Director of the Korean Language Program in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. She coauthored the KLEAR Integrated Korean Workbook series and revised its Textbook Series 2nd and 3rd editions. She served as the president of the American Association of Teachers of Korean (2018–2021). Her research interests include Korean linguistics and language pedagogy, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics.
Eun Sung Park is Professor in the English Department at Sogang University. Her research interests include SLA, asset-based pedagogy for refugee-background students, and multilingual users’ ELF and translanguaging practices. She has published articles in Applied Linguistics, Journal of Language, Identity, & Education, Language and Intercultural Communication, Language Learning, Language Teaching Research, and TESOL Quarterly, among others. She also coedited English Education at the Tertiary Level in Asia (2017) and authored Instructed SLA: A Practical Guide for Teachers (2020).
