Konglish: An Enthusiastic Look in to Korean English

Konglish is a variant of English used by Korean native speakers and has a number of typical variations. I will be looking at some of my favourite K-Idols speaking English to spot these variations for myself, as well as listening to the view of a native English speaking blogger (American-Korean) who has lived in Seuol, South Korea, and experienced Konglish first hand.

As K-Pop is becoming a worldwide phenomenon, many Korean stars are beginning to learn English for the sake of communicating with their fans. However, this spread is still very limited, and as most K-Pop groups have at least one American-Korean member, their native Korean band mates tend not to be put in situations in which they speak English.

I first went to YouTube to search for clips of my favourite K-Pop girl group, 2NE1, speaking English. The group's leader, CL, learned English at an international school growing up and so is fluent when speaking it and shows very few signs of interference from Korean. However the other girls' English is less strong. Sisters Bom and Dara learned English through living in English speaking countries. Though learning English through the same means of immersion, they learned it in different countries entirely and so picked up different variations; Bom's being American and Dara's Filipino. Minzy's English is the weakest in the group and she often needs reassurance or prompts from the other members when attempting to speak it.

I looked at these videos in order to analyse their English: MTV Interview with 2NE1, 2NE1 Loves Watermelons and Porcupines - Intimate Interview, 2NE1 on Their First American Concert. In MTV Interview with 2NE1 Bom displays the variant of missing out articles or using them incorrectly, "I went to see psychic". In the second interview Bom also illustrates the common variant of not pluralising nouns, "I have a three dog". The way shes uses "a" in this statement is also another example of the incorrect use of articles in Konglish.  These are grammatical variations.

I very quickly realised it was difficult to find examples of K-Idols, other than the fluent members of groups, speaking English and moved on to my blogger sources. Thanks to said sources I needn't really say much, just watch Ramona's (sweetandtasty) video on the topic:

Ramona explores the lexical and phonological variations in this video, though the two are very closely related in Konglish.

A post from asktheexpat.blogspot.co.uk, ran by a Englishman who teaches English in South Korea, makes note of the most common grammatical mistakes English learning Koreans make, saying humorously that "the problem with being a long-term teacher here is that you get used to incorrect English and even Konglish sometime starts to make sense":

1. "He was died."
2. "I'm going to home."
3. "Are you drunken?" 
4. "I was today tired."
5. "I had a lunch/dinner with my friends" or "I took a medicine."
6. "Yesterday I got stress" or "I was stressful in the meeting."
7. "She looks like fat."
8. "Here is a notebook, not a folder."
9. "I have an appointment/promise with a friend." (disputed and possibly okay)
10. "I took a rest all weekend." (disputed)

As is the case in most English variants, most Konglish phonological errors are due to a lack of certain sounds not existing in Korean. For example, fricative sounds such as /f/, /v/ or /th/. Instead, these sounds are commonly replaced with the plosive /d/ or /b/ sounds. We can see an example of this in inocorrect spelling of "smoothie" here, in which /d/ is substituted in place of /th/:

Picture source: sweetandtastytv