Preamble

As specified at the end of last month, here we are following up to see whether the loanword ‘hallyu’ (from the Korean 한류 (韓流)) or the local calque, for example the English term ‘Korean Wave’ is used more frequently across languages and cultures.

Data

We once more use Google NGram Viewer as a source of data for American English, British English, French, German, and Spanish. While the precise size of these corpora are unknown, it is safe to assume that they are ‘big’. We further restrict our date range to 2000-2019 for closer comparability with last month’s report on the Korean-language Trends 21 Corpus.

Findings

Our findings are visualised below by language using bump charts to highlight which of the alternate forms is used with greater frequency in the relevant corpora.

Englishes

Despite notionally being part of ‘the same language’, there are clear differences in the use of the terms ‘Hallyu’ and ‘Korean Wave’ in US and UK English, visualised below.

First, there is the obvious temporal difference: both terms are attested in UK English three years earlier than in US English, that is, in 2002 rather than 2005. What’s more, we see a spike in the use of especially the term ‘Korean Wave’ in UK English in 2008 which is not matched in the US data, which seems to indicate the usage of both terms growing more steadily over time, rather than the punctuated, spiky appearance of the UK English visualisation. It is also striking that the peak of the combined frequency for these terms was 2013 in the UK, but much later, in 2018 in the US.

The two datasets also differ in terms of which variant is used more frequently. In the US, it seems that the term ‘Hallyu’ was been adopted and enjoyed a brief period of use more widespread than the term ‘Korean Wave’ between 2014 and 2015. Since that time, it has accounted for a significant proportion of the mentions of either term. In contrast, the UK shows an almost overwhelming preference for the term ‘Korean Wave’, which appears in the data less frequently than ‘Hallyu’ only in the years 2006 and 2010, when both terms were almost vanishingly rare and just a few extra attestations could make all the difference. While its frequency of attestation increases alongside the use of the term ‘Korean Wave’, the word has not undergone the sustained, equalising increase in usage frequency that is has in the US English data.

French

French, in common with the other non-English languages discussed here, is not uniquely spoken in one country, and is used by people who orient towards multiple different standardised or prestige varieties. This limits the conclusions we may draw about the frequency of the competing terms in these datasets as the proportion of data drawn from different geographical regions is not known. Thus, we will not be able to comment about, say, the reception of the Korean Wave in France or Mali, but will, rather, restrict our observations to a more global characterisation of the relationship between a broad, global conception of the French language and the Korean language.

While the term ‘Vague Coréene’ is attested prior to ‘Hallyu’ in the French data, from 2001, its frequency of use is eclipsed by that of the loanword. While the combined frequency of attestation has increased over the surveyed period, it has not done so in a sustained way, in contrast to the US English data, for example. Rather, we see periodic spikes of more frequent appearance in the corpus, most espeically in 2014, when the frequency of both terms increased markedly.

We also note that, even at its highest level, the combined frequency of attestations of these terms as a proportion of words in the French dataset was only roughly half that of the US and UK English datasets (i.e., just over 0.00001% in the case of French, but well in excess of 0.00002% for both varieties of English).

German

While German is not spoken globally as a native language by as many people as French, and with a rather different geographic distribution, we note that it is possible to orient towards multiple standard forms and prescriptive norms when using the language. For these reasons, the caveats about the conclusions we are able to draw from this data outlined above once more apply.

Despite its relatively late first attestation in 2006, the German term ‘Koreanische Welle’ appears in the collection before the loanword. This is characteristic the German dataset shares with both varieties of English and French. Unlike the varieties of English, but similarly to French, after a brief initial period the loanword is used with overwhelmingly greater frequency than the native calque.

The temporal distribution of the attestation of the terms in the German dataset is striking. The peak in 2010 is earlier than the other datasets examined to this point. It is, however, an order of magnitude smaller than the peaks of those datasets. That is, the peak frequency of both terms as a proporiton of all the words in the German dataset is 0.000001%, whereas it is ten time greater, or just over 0.00001%, for the French dataset. A final observation to make about the German dataset is that from 2013 there has been a clear trend of the frequency of attestations of both terms increasing, although driven primarily by the increasing frequency of attestation of the term ‘Hallyu’. This feature of the distribution is shared by the US English dataset, but not UK English or French.

Spanish

We reiterate that Spanish is used across the globe and by people who orient towards a range of national, standardised, and prescriptive varieties. Our findings, then, will relate more to the qualities and characteristics of the global relations between languages rather than allowing us to comment on any local particularities of the reception of the Korean Wave.

Unusually, both terms are attested in the Spanish dataset for the first time in the same year. Even from then, in 2005, the loanword ‘Hallyu’ has typically been attested with much greater frequency. Indeed, only in the year 2011 does the calque ‘Ola Coreana’ appear more in the dataset. Impressionistically, it is that period which marks the inception of the somewhat punctuated, but nevertheless clearly discernible, upward trend in the combined frequency of attestation of both terms, which persists until their peak at the very end of the surveyed period. Finally, like German, even at its peak the relative frequency of both terms as a proportion of the words in the Spanish dataset is an order of magnitude lower than that of the datasets for both varieties of English.

Conclusion

To briefly summarise our empirical findings, our analysis revealed differences in the timing of the first attestation of both terms across the datasets and differences in the timing of the ‘peak’ or greatest frequency of attestation. Due to some ambiguities concerning the national origins of the texts which constitute some of these datasets, we cannot speculate on whether there is a connection between physical geography (i.e., distance from Korea) and these observations.

It is, however, possible to comment on the relative frequency of the loanword ‘Hallyu’ and various localised calque forms. While there was no dataset in which either form was attested more frequently than the other over the entirety of the surveyed period there is a clear distinction to be drawn between the varieties of English and the other languages examined here. Namely, English, most especially UK English, seems to be unusual in the extent to which the calque is used more frequently than the loanword. We may speculate that this is due to differences in the way English and Korean, as opposed to Korean and the other languages discussed here, stand in relation to one another. That is, (speakers of) languages other than English may be more receptive to using Korean loanwords for new social or technological concepts than (speakers of) English. This, though, would run contrary to a longstanding historical trend of English being highly receptive to loanwords (see here for details). Whether this change is due to something specific to the Korean Wave (e.g., the existence of a suitable calque), the linguistic dissimilarity between English and Korean (e.g., some difficulty or markedness in using the word ‘Hallyu’ for English speakers), the social position of Korean in the English-speaking world (e.g., English being receptive to loanwords from historically prestigious languages such as French as opposed to other languages), or some other factor remains an open question.

Finally, we note that the language-specific patterns of engagement we observe appear indicate there is no clear connection between the frequency with which discourse surrounding the Korean Wave appears in Korea, as exemplified by the frequency of attestation of the term hallyu (한류) in the Trends 21 Corpus, and the frequency with which the the phenomenon is addressed in a range of world languages. Thus, while the data presented here demonstrates the global nature of the Korean Wave, it also underlines the importance of understanding it in its specific, local instantiations.

Acknowledgement
This work was supported by the Core University Program for Korean Studies of the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and Korean Studies Promotion Service at the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2021-OLU-2250004)