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BYU Asian Studies Student Journal

Keywords

code-switching, K-pop linguistics, matrix language model

Abstract

Hallyu, or the Korean Wave, has been a rapidly growing area of study for scholars over the past few decades. However, previous research focuses on topics such as the globalization and diffusion of Korean culture instead of examining that diffusion from a linguistic standpoint. As such, there is still a gap in the literature that deals with Korean-English code-switching and, specifically, K-pop song lyrics. This paper attempts to address this gap by analyzing the grammar of English-Korean codeswitching in K-pop song lyrics according to Myers-Scotton’s Matrix Language Frame Model. This model argues that one language involved in code-switching is more dominant; Myers-Scotton calls this the Matrix Language (ML) and the other language the Embedded Language (EL). The ML provides the morphosyntactic framework that phrases from the EL are inserted into. In order to examine this, songs containing a mixture of both English and Korean lyrics were selected from Korea’s Melon yearly top 50 charts from 2022 and 2023. Their lyrics created a corpus containing around 15,000 words, providing several hundred examples of English-Korean code-switching. The instances of code-switching were then analyzed and classified based on the grammatical structure of their English and Korean constituents. The majority of examples of codeswitching found in the corpus could be classified into a small number of categories, suggesting that code-switching in the genre of K-pop song lyrics generally adheres to a strict set of rules and constraints. Studying this topic provides valuable information about how the human brain stores, combines, and processes the grammatical structures of two languages.

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