Today many people associate Korea with large corporations such as Samsung, Hyundai, or LG. As remarkable as its rapid technological advancement is the country's growing fervor for learning English. Compared with other countries, Korea is rather distinctive in remaining monocultural in its overall demographic composition. Behind the seemingly quiet, monolingual and monocultural façade is a vibrant force that drives its people toward an Anglophone world. Once colonized by Japan, Korea was heavily influenced by the Japanese language and culture. It is no coincidence that the Korean lexicon contains many words of English origin (Anglicisms) that are also found in Japanese. Examples include hotchkiss (‘stapler’), ball pen (‘ballpoint pen’), pama (‘perm’), manicure (‘nail polish’), salaryman (‘salaried man’), and mass com (from ‘mass communication’, used for ‘media’). These represent only a handful of examples among numerous Anglicized words that entered the Korean language during the Japanese colonization which spanned a period of thirty-six years.

Since the departure of the Japanese regime in 1945, Korea has continued on its own interesting linguistic journey, striving for total independence by trying to rid its language of Japanese influence. When the author was a student in Korea in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a national grassroots movement promoting the elimination of Japanese influence in Korean. Words such as bento (‘lunch’), gurimu (‘cream’), warubashi (‘chopsticks’), damanegi (‘onions’), dama (‘marbles’) and obong (‘a large plate’) were strongly discouraged. Although a large number of Anglicized Japanese words introduced during the colonial period are still widely used in Korea, many new ones have been created, exhibiting unique and interesting patterns in their development.

This article examines Anglicized Korean words under four major categories, based on the semantic and morphological changes; semantic shift, creative compounding, mixed-code combination, and clipping. Although phonological changes usually occur along with semantic and morphological changes, this article does not discuss the phonological changes in detail. The examples are taken from everyday Korean vocabulary, but they by no means form an exhaustive list. The purpose of this article is to use selected examples to demonstrate how these words show the creativity of Korean speakers in meeting their unique linguistic, cultural, and social needs.

Semantic shift

Anglicized Korean words in this category have different meanings from the existing English words. Words such as stand (‘lamp’), cider (a generic name for carbonated drinks such as Seven-up or Sprite), talent (‘TV celebrity’), villa (‘small apartment units’), overeat (‘to throw up’), meeting (‘college students’ blind dates'), and punk (‘a hole in a tire’ or a ‘floating device’) are widely used examples, with some phonological modification. Since vowels are required after consonants in Korean, its speakers add an epenthetic vowel, changing, for example, a one syllable word stand to three, similar to /sətændə/. Also included in this category are words such as ‘MT’ (from ‘membership training’, referring to college students' retreat) and ‘A/S’ (from after-service, warranty), which are commonly used by Koreans but confuse foreigners.

Another interesting example is restaurant. Although it preserves its original meaning, in Korean, a 레스토랑 (/resutorang/) usually refers to a fancy, upscale place, not including fast food restaurants or low to average quality eateries. What is interesting is that the English word restaurant has undergone semantic amelioration in Korean, refining its meaning, whereas 식당 ‘shik dang’, the Korean word for ‘restaurant’, exists as a generic term for dining places in general.

Creative compounding

Words in this category are created by combining two English words to replace existing English compound nouns or to create new words. Pay doctor (‘a salaried doctor’), hand phone (‘cell phone’), bargain sale (‘sale’), eye shopping (‘window shopping’), gag man (‘comedian’), also gag woman, and back mirror (‘rearview mirror’) are widely used items of Korean vocabulary.

What is noteworthy is that the first part of the compound words uses relatively well known and simpler English words (e.g., pay vs. salary, back vs. rearview, eye vs. window). For example, the word salary is less frequently used than pay, so Koreans have replaced it with a term that is more widely understood. Words such as hand phone, eye shopping, and back mirror reflect different semantic interpretations by Korean people. That is, what characterizes a cellular phone is its smaller size and the portable quality, thereby creating a hand phone. The term eye shopping suggests that a person merely looks at the merchandise, without buying any. For Koreans, the central meaning in this expression is looking; therefore, a more suitable term is eye shopping rather than the semantically distant window shopping. The case of back mirror reflects Korean people's degree of familiarity with the word used. The word rear is not a familiar term to most Koreans, so Koreans have replaced it with a more common word back, creating a much easier term, back mirror.

Mixed-code combination

A word such as ahn jeon belt (Korean word, ‘safety’ + ‘belt’) and names of popular snacks such as gam ja chip (Korean word, ‘potato’ + ‘chip’) and yang pa ring (Korean word, ‘onion’ + ‘ring’) utilize an English word in the second part of the compound word. The word jetech is a relative newcomer but appears in newspapers and online articles every day. It combines a Chinese loan word, ‘재 (je)’, which means property or fortune, and the English affix tech (from technique), meaning a technique or method of increasing one's property (e.g., financial or real estate investment). Minus tong jang is another important new vocabulary item. It combines the English word, ‘minus’, with a Korean word, tong jang (‘bank account’), referring to a specific type of account that allows customers with good credit ratings to borrow money from the bank when they have a negative balance while still maintaining their current credit rating.

Slang terms such as long da ri (‘long’ + Korean word, ‘leg’, meaning ‘a person with long legs’) and shot da ri (shot for ‘short’, meaning ‘a person with short legs’) are also interesting coinages that are frequently heard in casual conversations, as well as noon ting, which combines the Korean word, 눈 (/noon/, eye), and the English suffix -(t)ing (from the word meeting), meaning ‘someone who is only reading Internet postings, but not contributing to them’.

Clipping

Many Anglicisms, especially newly adopted ones, tend to be shortened. Back music (‘background music’), omu rice (‘omelet rice’), dia (‘diamond’), air con (‘air conditioning’), mass com (‘mass communication’), used for ‘media’, and DC (‘discount’) are part of everyday Korean vocabulary.

Further interesting examples include newly coined colloquial words such as be pu (‘best’ + ‘friend’), pe book (‘Facebook’), hanpun (‘hand phone’), team ple ‘team project’, and sel ca (from self camera, meaning ‘photos taken by oneself – e.g., on a cell phone’). It can be seen that be pu, pe book, and han pun also show phonological change in the pronunciation of ‘f’. Since the voiceless labiodental fricative /f/ does not exist in the Korean phonetic system, it is replaced by the bilabial stop /p/, the nearest equivalent in the home language.

Another commonly used word is re ple. Coming from the word reply, it refers to ‘comments left on blogs or other Internet postings’. It is quite interesting that this newly coined word has unique inflections, first by adding a Korean prefix, ahk-, which means ‘bad’ or ‘malicious’. The word ahk ple thus means ‘a malicious reply’ to someone's Internet posting. A second inflection adds an -er suffix denoting an agent as in ‘singer’ or ‘writer’. Ahk pler is used for someone who posts malicious content on the Internet. More informal terms such as king ka (from king card, meaning ‘the most wonderful man’) and queen ka (from queen card, the female counterpart) also appear frequently in magazines and online articles. All these new coinages show a tendency toward a two-syllable structure, far removed from the English originals.