Amid Squid Game and K-pop, Seoul spots a challenge to its soft power: Konglish, a hybrid of Korean and English

A growing trend in which young people pepper their speech with hybridised words mixing English and Korean has got Seoul worried

Older Koreans are fiercely proud of their language, lauded for its precision, while Seoul fears the lingo is undermining its soft power push

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A man disinfects a street in Seoul, South Korea. English words are increasingly visible on street signs, much to the displeasure of Hangul’s many fans. Photo: AP

Published: 7:00am, 20 Oct 2021Updated: 10:58pm, 20 Oct 2021

Cho Mi-hak, 66, wanted to know how her son’s job was going, so she stole a glimpse at his mobile phone and the text messages he had been exchanging with friends and colleagues.

Her son needn’t have worried about his privacy, however, as she could barely understand a word.

“Gosh, I couldn’t wrap my head around some of the messages as they were laden with strange words, ones that appeared to be combinations of shortened words or hybrids of English and Korean that were beyond my apprehension,” she said.

She later came to learn that Bepu meant “best friend”, Ah-Ah meant “Iced Americano”, Inssa was “insider” and Assa was “outsider”. In short, her son’s messages were littered with Konglish – hybridised words that mix Korean and English and are popular with the younger generation but largely incomprehensible to their elders.

The rise of Konglish has been troubling the elder generation for years, but concerns over its use have hit new heights amid the coronavirus pandemic, which has turbocharged the vocabulary with additions like untact, meaning “contactless payment”; corona blue, meaning pandemic-related depression; spandemic, for pandemic related expenses such as food deliveries; and coronomy, for the Covid-induced economic slowdown.

For the older generation, such words represent the butchering of a language that instils so much national pride that the anniversary of its alphabet’s creation is marked with a national holiday every October 9.