Modelling the Englishization of vocabulary in contemporary Korean

This study aims to analyse how English has been incorporated into contemporary Korean vocabulary, analysing vocabulary items from the 2014 New Words list published by the National Institute of Korean Language. It also surveys previous research on the Englishization of Korean vocabulary in order to devise a descriptive model of lexical borrowing from English in the contemporary Korean language. The examination of a wide range of data demonstrates that lexical borrowing into Korean is highly complex, involving at least four combinations of source languages: (i) English (only), (ii) traditional Korean and English, (iii) Sino-Korean and English, and (iv) English, traditional Korean and Sino-Korean. The findings suggest that 'borrowed' words undergo hybridized word formation processes in creative and innovative ways, which this paper attempts to describe using the model of lexical borrowing presented in this article.