What K-Pop Can Teach Us About Korean Language and Society: The Case of BTS

Friday, November 7, 2025 from 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm

• In-person event
• 303, St. Patrick’s Building, Carleton University
• 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON, K1S 5B6

Please join the School of Linguistics and Language Studies for a presentation with Dr. Joowon Suh (Columbia University).

What K-Pop Can Teach Us About Korean Language and Society:
The Case of BTS

With the affordances of social media and new interactive technologies, K-pop, the leading genre of Hallyu, the Korean Wave, has emerged as an appealing and stimulating research focus for exploring the Korean language and society. This talk aims to extend the research and pedagogical inquiries into K-pop by exploring key sociolinguistic issues related to BTS, the unparalleled global K-pop phenomenon. The presentation showcases examples of language mixing, language contact, and translanguaging practices represented in BTS’s music and the discourses surrounding their fandom and BTS-related contents, products, and environments. By examining these highly localized and distinctively stylized languages of BTS, as well as the multilingual and multicultural communication surrounding the BTS phenomenon, we can make meaningful contributions to the sociolinguistic understanding of hybrid language use, multimodal competence, and digital literacy, media literacy, and pop culture literacy in this rapidly globalizing world. This underscores the interdisciplinarity of (socio)linguistics, language pedagogy, media studies, and cultural studies, inviting a diverse range of scholarly minds to contribute to our understanding of Korean society. As Warner & Dupuy (2017) argued, pop culture texts are “never culturally neutral, but rather are embedded in, and shaped by, histories and contexts, language, speech communities, modes, and text types” (p. 116). 

Joowon Suh (Ed.D., Teachers College, Columbia University) is Director of the Korean Language Program in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. Before joining Columbia in 2017, she served as the Director of the Korean Language Program at Princeton University for 14 years. She co-authored the KLEAR Integrated Korean Workbook Series, Beginning 1 & 2 (2019) and Intermediate 1 & 2 (2020), and revised its Textbook Series, 2nd and 3rd Editions, published by the University of Hawaii Press. Her edited volume, BTS and Languages: K-pop Transcending Language and Communication (Routledge), was published in 2025. She served as the President of the American Association of Teachers of Korean (2018-2021). Her research interests include Korean linguistics and language pedagogy, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and interlanguage pragmatics.  

This event is sponsored by the 2025 Korean Studies Grant Program of the Academy of Korean Studies.