Konglish

Robert J. Dickey

Keimyung University

What is it?

What is it?

• Definitions?

• Examples?

•“Prescriptive” vs. “Descriptive”

• Language Purists

• Humpty Dumpty’s “Words mean what I want them to mean” (or something like that)

What is it? (Language)

Prescriptivist vs. Descriptivist

Prescriptions

• 17th Century

– “Dictionaries”

– Grammars

• “Gentry” of the age

Corpus Linguistics

• Let’s look at a body of “text” and figure out what the rules are (decode).

– Vocabulary

– Grammar

– Culture

– etc

Corpus Linguistics

• Linguistic Imperialism here?

– Which “sources” of language are accepted for the study?

• Geography

• Socio-economic status

• Written vs. Oral texts

• Authentic (live) vs. Planned (tv scripts?)

Some supposed “types” of Konglish

1. Koreanized pronunciation of English words (loanwords, borrowed words)

2. English words dropped into Korean grammatical structures (loanwords…)

★ Is this Interlanguage? Fossilization? Pidginization? Englishization?

Some supposed “types” …

3. Direct Loanwords (Cognates)

4. Hybrid Terms (binil-bongtu, long-dari)

5. Truncated (remocon)

6. Psuedo-Loanwords (manicure, Konglish)

7. Pure Fabrications (gagman, gasoline-girl)

8. Corruptions (fighting!)

Some supposed “types” …

9. False-Cognates (false friends) – words that appear to share a linguistic root (meaning, heritage) but in fact do not.

Within the same language

Within different languages

Examples…

Other Issues

• Substitution (replacing perfectly good Korean terms in popular usage)

Asian or Global Englishes?

• What if the same “non-standard” usage can be found across a number of countries?

• Many Konglishes came from Japan

Teacher Ignorance

• “That’s not English”

Teacher Ignorance

• “That’s not English” (oops!)

• Perfectly good English, just not where I come from!

Creativity in Language

• Limited to Native Speakers?

• Singaporean English and Singlish

– Singaporean Literature (Amy Tan)

• Similar with Ireland, India, Philippines, S.Africa, Nigeria, Jamaica…

• Same argument historically, USA, Australia, Canada…

Robert J. Dickey

Keimyung University

Daegu

S. Korea 704-701

rjdickey@content-english.org