Samosir and Wee examine how the immensely popular Korean Wave ("K-wave") also known as Hallyu is wielded as soft power through the use of communication for persuasion and attraction on the global stage. The Korean Wave refers to the global spread and popularity of South Korean culture, particularly its pop music ("K-pop"), serialised dramas ("K-dramas") and films ("K-films"). Given the South Korean government’s involvement in providing funding and publicity, the Korean Wave raises interesting sociolinguistic questions about the relationship between artistry and citizenship, the use of social media in facilitating the consumption of cultural products, and, ultimately, the nature of soft power itself. Studies of soft power have tended to come from the field of international relations. This book shows that sociolinguistics actually has a number of tools in its conceptual arsenal – such as indexicality, stance taking, affect, and styling – that can shed light on the Korean Wave as a form of soft power. As the first book-length sociolinguistic analysis of the Korean Wave and soft power, this book demonstrates how K-pop, K-dramas, and K-films have been able to encourage in consumers an anthropological stance towards all things Korean. This volume will be of particular interest to students and scholars in sociolinguistics, political science, cultural studies, and Korean studies.

Intended as a companion to the popular KLEAR Textbooks in Korean Language series and designed and edited by a leading Korean linguist, this is the first volume of its kind to treat specifically the critical role of language in Korean culture and society. An introductory chapter provides the framework of the volume, defining language, culture, and society and their interrelatedness and presenting an overview of the Korean language vis-à-vis its culture and society from evolutionary and dynamic perspectives. Early on, contributors examine the invention and use of the Korean alphabet, South Korea’s "standard language" vs. North Korea’s "cultured language," and Korean in contact with Chinese and Japanese. Several topics representative of Korean socio-cultural vocabulary (sound symbolic words, proverbs, calendar-related terms, kinship terms, slang expressions) are discussed, followed by a consideration of Korean honorifics and other related issues. Two chapters on Korean media, one on advertisements and the other a comparative analysis of television ads in Korea, Japan, and the U.S., follow. Finally, contributors look at salient features of the language, narrative structure, and dialectal variation. All chapters are accompanied by a set of student questions and a useful bibliography. A beginning level of proficiency in Korean is sufficient to digest the Korean examples with facility, making this volume accessible to a wide range of students. Contributors: Andrew S. Byon, Sungdai Cho, Young-A Cho, Young-mee Y. Cho, Miho Choo, Shin Ja J. Hwang, Ross King, Haejin Elizabeth Koh, Jeyseon Lee, Douglas Ling, Duk-Soo Park, Yong-Yae Park, S. Robert Ramsey, Carol Schulz, Ho-min Sohn, Susan Strauss, Hye-Sook Wang, Jaehoon Yeon.

With an eye to the playful, reflexive, self-conscious ways in which global youth engage with each other online, this volume analyzes user-generated data from these interactions to show how communication technologies and multilingual resources are deployed to project local as well as trans-local orientations. With examples from a range of multilingual settings, each author explores how youth exploit the creative, heteroglossic potential of their linguistic repertoires, from rudimentary attempts to engage with others in a second language to hybrid multilingual practices. Often, their linguistic, orthographic, and stylistic choices challenge linguistic purity and prescriptive correctness, yet, in other cases, their utterances constitute language policing, linking 'standardness' or 'correctness' to piety, trans-local affiliation, or national belonging. Written for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in linguistics, applied linguistics, education and media and communication studies, this volume is a timely and readymade resource for researching online multilingualism with a range of methodologies and perspectives.

The 'Korean wave' in music and film and Korea's rise to become the twelfth economic power in the world have boosted the world-wide popularity of Korean language study. The linguistic study of Korean, with its rich syntactic and phonological structure, complex writing system, and unique socio-historical context, is now a rapidly growing research area. Contributions from internationally renowned experts on the language provide a state-of-the-art overview of key current research in Korean language and linguistics. Chapters are divided into five thematic areas: phonetics and phonology, morphology and syntax, semantics and pragmatics, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics, and language pedagogy. The Handbook includes cross-linguistic data to illuminate the features of Korean, and examples in Korean script, making it suitable for advanced students and researchers with or without prior knowledge of Korean linguistics. It is an essential resource for students and researchers wishing to explore the exciting and rapidly moving field of Korean linguistics.

This book sheds light on aspects of the Korean Wave and Korean media products that are less discussed—Korean literature, webtoon, and mukbang. It explores the making of these Korean popular cultural products and how they work and engage media recipients regardless of their different national, cultural, and geographical backgrounds. Drawing on narrative theory and cultural studies, the book makes a compelling argument about how to analyze the production and consumption of Korean media within and beyond its national boundary with critical eyes. The author shows how transmedial narrative studies (narrative studies across media) offers analytical and theoretical lenses through which one can interpret new and emerging media forms and contents. Furthermore, she explores how these forms and contents can be better understood when they are contextualized within specific time and place using the cultural, social, and political concepts and precepts of the region. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of Asian Studies, popular culture, contemporary cyberculture, media and culture studies, and literary theory.

"This collaborative study of the Korean language diaspora looks at the history and present in regions with a significant Korean population with reference to the economy, politics, education, and society, and considering the future. The volume also examines government policies regarding Korean language spread"--

The title of this book, The Korean Wave: from a Private Commodity to a Public Good, refers to the idea that the Korean Wave has now crossed its nation’s borders and become an international public good. Because the Korean Wave has so far surpassed its national borders to become a subject of global attention, we consider the Korean Wave through the lenses of power, interest, identity, politicization, and the “anti-Korean wave”. “In this context, we are proud to have supported the work that has led to this publication. We congratulate the editors on promoting a unique interdisciplinary perspective on popular culture and international relations, featuring contributions by both humanists and social scientists, and focusing on a hugely signifcant transcultural phenomenon - the Korean Wave - that originated in Asia yet spread across the globe. The questions of identity, interest, and power raised by this publication, based on a series of conferences held on our campus, are as signifcant as they are innovative. I hope you, the reader, will be inspired by this collection to pursue your own inquiries and further develop the study of Korean culture in global context.” - Michel Hockx, Director of Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, University of Notre Dame