#Phenomena movie languages tv#

“Now it is perceived more modern, advanced, marketable, cooler, and hipper.”įor decades, East Asian language studies overseas have mostly been limited to Mandarin Chinese and Japanese.īut that began to change in the past decade after major hits by Korean artists and directors, such as Psy’s 2012 song “Gangnam Style,” the 2019 thriller “Parasite,” the 2021 Netflix show “Squid Game,” and the emergence of BTS, undoubtedly the biggest global stars of K-pop.įigures show a surge in interest toward the language in the same period. “Compared to the time I started my career, the perceptions of Korea as a nation, Korean culture and society, and the Korean language have gone through a significant, positive change,” said Joowon Suh, director of the Korean Language Program at Columbia University. Now, the Korean language could be the next export to go global. This phenomenon has been aided by South Korea’s own government, which has worked to spread the country’s cultural influence through music and media since the 1990s. The country has become an international cultural juggernaut – so much so that the Oxford English Dictionary added more than 20 words of Korean origin in 2021, saying in a statement, “We are all riding the crest of the Korean wave.”

#Phenomena movie languages tv#

The last two decades have seen South Korean exports sweep the world, from K-pop and Korean TV dramas to beauty products, fashion and food. Japanese fans of K-pop group BTS at a cafe featuring BTS goods in Seoul, South Korea, on June 15, 2022. This rise in interest, experts and teachers say, is thanks to the Korean wave, or “hallyu” – the proliferation of Korean culture internationally. English and Spanish still sit comfortably in the top two spots.

Duolingo, which has more than 500 million users internationally, ranks Korean ahead of Chinese, Russian and Hindi, and behind Italian. Korean is the second most-studied Asian language on Duolingo, only narrowly behind Japanese, according to the language report. And it’s seeing particular success in parts of South and Southeast Asia, as the most-studied foreign language in the Philippines, and not far off the top spot in Thailand, Indonesia and Pakistan.Īlthough Chinese – which for years has been considered as the business language of the future – remains the second most spoken language in the world, thanks in part to the sheer size of China’s population, it has sat in eighth place on Duolingo for the last several years, lagging behind Korean. In 2022, Korean was the seventh most-studied language on the learning app Duolingo, according to the company’s annual language report. It’s one of the fastest-growing languages in the world, outpacing traditionally popular rivals like Chinese in multiple markets – reflecting the global phenomenon many call the “Korean wave.” There’s never been a better time to learn Korean.