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Ah yes the old Slavophile and Western Modernist divide between Russian elites. If more Americans knew about this they would have a better understanding of Russia and its politics.
That's actually a Thing in Russian literature!! I remember it was a big thing with Pushkin, I don't remember if it started before him or if he's the trope codifier, but there's a big "French symbolizes this person is not attached to their Russian roots and are therefore fake and plastic" theme in Russian lit. (Sorry if you already knew this, I got excited, hope I'm not mansplaining Russian lit to you lol)
This is probably more of a reflection on the fact that I'm a unilingual anglophone, but I noticed something else about this movie's use of English. There's a tendency among the characters to use English as a way to show off (imo) or to get one over on someone else; in one instance, when Mrs. Park says "Is that okay with you?", she's trying to see if Jessica is actually fluent or not. The only person who uses English in a sincere way (the "Respect!" guy) is batshit insane. I don't know how accurate I'm being here, but English in Parasite might be the language of bullshit.
It's like that in German media too, because of the internet there are a lot more English words from tech or business jargon that have infiltrated the German language and in TV shows they make insincere or vain characters like hipsters, politicians or business men, overuse English for comedic effect.
As a Korean American, this video explored so much of my history that wasn't taught to me. The ways in which colonialism affects us. Things Korean Americans don't talk about. This was so cathartic to have someone understand how weird it is to be korean in today's society. Thank you. (Like low-key almost cried watching this) ❤.
Cosplay is a super interesting one because, whilst it's undoubtedly an English word, it is - along with salaryman - an example of 和製英語 or 'English made in Japan'. So it is a Japanese word also, arguably an English loan word into English, as well as Korean. Of course, this only underscores the points made in the video.
Hoo boy, yeah, it's rather difficult from the outside looking in, with Japanese loanwords, because they don't use it like English. First I need to read a word slowly, know which letters to delete to have it make sense, and then use context to know what it means. It's not so-fu-to sa-vu, it's soft serve, and it means ice cream. It's written as bai-to, taken from German Arbeit, which means "work", but here it means "part-time worker". It's a giant struggle from time to time.
@@TheDanishGuyReviews "I went to a Vietnamese cafe for a coffee, and a banh mi and pain au chocolat." the swapping back and forth of words is everywhere if you look for it
@@lindsayj2389 How do you mean? That loan words are everywhere? I think the difference is cultural in your sentence, since I know what a café, a coffee, and a pain au chocolat is already.
Well, the thing is loan words referring to specific foods also often have the habit of diverting in meaning quite significantly. See how cutlet goes into japanese to mean "deep-fried breaded (usu. pork) cutlet" and then goes back to English to mean (especially in the UK) a curry sauce, that doesn't necessarily bear any close resemblance to japanese curry sauce (which is also an import from India - as is the word curry). Or to give an example the other way, langue du chat biscuits are popular in Japan, but they're not even shaped like the cats tongue the french name refers to, and are instead two rectangular biscuits with chocolate sandwiched between. Anyway, English also adopts loan words into its lexicon that are used in strikingly different ways to the word in the original language. That's just part of language. My point was that English has such a position as a world language that new English words regularly get coined outside of countries where English is widely spoken as a first language. Japanese is well known for this, but of course it happens all over. For example, in India you might hear someone say "prepone" instead of "bring forward".
@@TheDanishGuyReviews more that the same word is loaned into the English language multiple times from different sources, and with different ultimate meanings. cafe and coffee are doublets the history of French colonialism intersects with the history of American imperialism in the English loanword banh mi, while its doublet pain is paired with the word chocolat, whose etymon was acquired with the colonisation of the Americas. there is a lot of history in each of the closely related words in that sentence
🪨 No joke, when William Wanger said “We don’t do Nationalism” I bursted out laughing even before the “Yankee Doodle Dandy” clip played. Excellent work as always, Kyle.
As a psychology and linguistics student... it's only more difficult to learn a second language because you have to do it _consciously_ instead of unconsciously. It has nothing to do with age or anything, so don't let it hold you back. Go out there and learn, my friends! Learn all of the things!
Jeez where do you linguistics students that don’t know about the critical period of language acquisition come from? It’s the worst “pop science” myth to spread about linguistics in the last couple of years that sets L2 students up for disappointment when they are worse than a toddler in their target language after years of trying
@@everwhatever Aren't there papers out there that proves language acquisition depends on input? How would you describe the process of learning a new language?
@@cagdasmuldur250 are there? What are their names and authors? Of course language acquisition depends on input, but even full language immersion as an adult will not lead to the speed, accuracy and effortlessness with which a 5 year old has complete command of their native language. And yea, if you read them more books or have them learn the alphabet early they may know more words, or score higher on some tests, but even a child that grows like a weed with no one specifically teaching them still acquires the language at essentially the same speed.
Yeah, like, as a swede who spends all my time online, despite english only being my second language I tend to have an easier time finding words in english than swedish these days. Not even for a lack of swedish words to use, I don't actually have a need for loanwords most of the time, but bc I simply forget words in my own language! And my pronunciation is way better than some of my peers, bc I immerse myself in the language 24/7. I actually struggled with english in middle school, mostly bc all we did was memorizing words and watch One Tree Hill for some reason. (didn't help that swedish schools did the switch from teaching UK to US english during my time in school. suddenly we weren't supposed to spell it "colour" anymore!) But during high school I both started going online alot more and my education was alot better, felt weird when I knew the word "oven" but a classmate of mine didn't. (especially since it's not that far from the swedish word for it, "ugn") Point being, I feel like I ended up learning english both consciously _and_ subconsciously. Which I imagine is the case for most ppl today who's got english as their second language, at least in the west, but to what degree still rly depends on how much you interact with ppl and media online on an international level.
let's be honest, it's harder for several other reasons. there's almost certainly neurophysiological advantages as an infant. then there's having to do things like work and care for yourself, which creates a huge differential in the actual time you can dedicate. then there's all the factors that are inherently different between L1 and L2 acquisition even for children. even if you can afford to move for a year or two and immerse yourself in the language completely, an adult can't expect to reach fluency in a timeframe anywhere near that of a young child. also i don't know for certain but I really doubt that L1 acquisition is unconscious.
This made me remember an anecdote from when I was a kid: This happened when I was in first grade, back then I was good at English class which all my teachers saw as a great thing, I'm from Mexico and, much like in Korea, English is seen as a very important asset to secure a good paying job (and much like in Korea, it is hardly as great an asset as it seems). One of my teachers was so enamored with the idea that I was good at English that she began calling me "Maurice", because, as she explained, that was how my name was pronounced in English (My name is Mauricio). Anyway, at some point, I remember telling my mom that the teacher used to call me Maurice and my mom got really angry and told me to always correct my teacher and tell her to use my real given name. I didn't understand why my mom was so upset about the teacher changing my name... Today I do.
If I have a student whose L1 is Spanish, I always try to use what I remember from my high school Spanish classes to make the material easier to understand. That’s what culturally responsive teaching is supposed to be about- quite literally responding to the cultures that enter your room. I’m sorry that your teacher didn’t permit you the full beauty of your name.
@@seanbirch That’s fair, I’m sorry for assuming. I’ve had experiences before where teachers give up on pronouncing a student’s name properly because “it’s just too difficult”
I find it ironic that your teacher considered "Maurice" the English form of "Mauricio". My Cajun French great-grandfather was given the name "Maurice" at birth and Anglicized it to "Morris" as an adult. Cajuns Anglicizing their names was very common in that generation, as evidenced by the fact I have another great-grandfather who was born "Andre" and died "Andrew". In the United States, even other colonizers can be the wrong kind of white and be colonized.
Kyle, if it's any consolation, it is extremely difficult on a deep neurophysiological level for *anyone* to correctly pronounce many words and names in a language which is phonologically very different from their own without extensive practice. In the process of learning a native language as a child, the brain develops in such a way that certain phonemes common in unrelated languages are literally not even heard in their original form.
It helps to be very conciuous of your mouth and throat, practise sounds over and over, speacially the nuances of vowels, you'll learn to pronounce most things pretty decetly without terrible effort
As a native speaker of Korean and an aspiring Korean language teacher, this was very thought-provoking video essay! I didn't expect to hear 김구's famous quote, which is used here quite often to boost national/cultural pride how Korean culture has become influencial worldwide. Which makes this vid much more meaningful to Korean audience as we pay less attention towards 'other' culture except for the American one(But this concept of American-ness is clearly limited, as Black American pop culture hardly gets the credit for Kpop industry). Hallyu or Kpop fans are more likely to be motivated to learn Korean, so I think there must be similar power dynamics in between Korean and Kpop fans from 'other' countries, for example SA or SEA culture. I wish I could add Korean subtitle in your vid so it gets access to Korean as well. Appreciate your efforts to make this video essay. And you got new subscriber. + You have no idea how many times I had to endure not to put "sorry for my bad Eng" phrase, which I just did now lol ++ Never say never to learn new languages if you want to! My mom is almost 60 yrs now and she has more than 300 days streak in Duolingo Spanish. Tho she wouldn't say she 'speaks' Spanish, she said it makes her happy bcuz it brings the joy of learning something new in her age.
I was particularly fascinated with your analogy of the Old French vs the Old English. "What will Korean sound like in 1,000 years?" Suddenly i remembered: you've touched on this before! Cloud Atlas: Subspeak and Consumer.
I found it interesting when you mentioned Americans "fawning over foreign things not realizing it's our own culture being sold back to us" because it's something I've become keenly aware of lately and have been wanting to have a discussion with someone about. I've been watching a lot of K-Drama's on Netflix recently and many of those I've watched either were historical, partly historical, or made reference to historical things. As a result, I know so much more about Korean history than I was ever curious to learn previously. And in learning about their history it strikes me that while they succeeded in maintaining their unique culture in some ways, in others they have been very Westernized. And it's fascinating to me seeing so many ways they are familiar to me and my culture, vs the things that juxtapose against Western culture, as well as the many many ways the two are weirdly blended. It makes me wonder how much they themselves are aware of it.
Gossip Girl has an Indonesian adaptation (Gossip Girl Indonesia). The rich characters (Serena and Blair mostly) would switch between English and Indonesian, and the less wealthy characters (Dan) would speak exclusively in Indonesian. His sister Jenny wants to get into the in crowd so she starts speaking more English as well.
I love how you categorize "Pizza", "Trauma" and "Pasta" as English words when they're loan words in their own right, though made widespread by their American use.
I mean here in the Philippines, historically one of the products of 50 years of direct American Imperial interventions. English is not only deeply present but is the official medium beyond primary school and government transactions. Culturally, it holds the distinction as badge of class privilege and afront reminder of the colonizers. Like in Korea, we code-switch more frequently. From personal (admittedly middle class) experience, speaking English fluently (especially it it's in an American accent/cadence) there has been an implicit social assumption of class and intelligence. But when speaking English in a more Filipino accent, its shifts in more derogatory tone of "being a social climber" or trying to invade into elite spaces. The point being is that, seeing this video just reminds me again of America's hegemony and its marks colonial it has left on my country
🪨 On the subject of cultural imperialism in the Korean Peninsula, I am reminded of how during the years following the Korean War, each half of the region was ruled, respectively, by a craven bureaucrat who on his assumption of power had spent so many years in the barracks of Soviet partisans that he was more fluent in Russian than his native Korean (Kim Il-Sung); and a rabid ideological fascist, shocking even to his former superiors, who willingly joined the Imperial Japanese Army to suppress his own people (Park Chung-Hee). What outside empires and their loyal servants have done to the Korean people can scarcely be calculated. "The red plague rid you for learning me your language," indeed.
Very fitting that Kyle had a cover of “Amerika” by Rammstein over his end credits as it’s about the same thing as he’s been discussing: American culture universality. Brilliant idea.
"It's true that non-American artists have broken though, but they've done so by adopting American affectations." Oh, it goes deeper, when you consider that a lot of k-pop is written and composed by swedish and norweigan producers. I think i recall one korean label executive saying in an interview, that scandinavian producers seems to understand what made american R&B 'click' better than even the americans themselves did
Huh. As a non-American it's bizarre to see this whole thing never say anything... wrong, and yet be so entirely and completely made from an American perspective. Like, the phrases being highlighted aren't all the same, but they're all highlighted. The use of non-white elements is seen from American racial categories. The application of the concept of "code-switching" to the use of English words or phrases. The conflating of loan words with English speech. None of it is wrong, all of it is fundamentally American. And self-aware, too, which I appreciate, but still American and not quite grasping what the non-American version would be. Look, I've spent the last decade and a half of my life working in English and speaking it more than my native language, and I live in a place that doesn't natively speak either. My perspective is... not averaage, but also not unique. It is, though, extremely different to the perspective of this piece. I am more aware than most of what the anglosphere is like, and yet I can't really understand its point of view fully. Makes for an interesting video essay, if maybe for different reasons than originally planned.
@@einootspork I specifically said I don't disagree. None of it is wrong. I am saying the *framing* is extremely American. Those are subtly different, but the difference is very important. There are a few things that could be construed as being incorrect or missing cultural details here and there, like the specifics of how each instance of English reads, which ones play as loan words and which ones have been naturalized to the point where they don't read as English and whatnot, but those are both trivial and acknowledged in the video multiple times. The framing, though? The framing is very US-specific. US-centric, at times. Like how the adoption of white cultural tropes is recognized as colonialism, but the adoption of cultural tropes from racial minorities is framed as appropriation. Is the difference real? Yes. Does it make sense? Sure, particularly inside the US. Is that a concern outside the US? Often, no. American music is often perceived as American music, regardless, in the same way, say, people think about flamenco or manele as "Spanish music" or "Romanian music" instead of a cultural expression specifically coded to improverished, segregated racial minorities in those countries. It all feels "foreign" from other places, and it all feels just as intrussive and haegemonic as each other, more oftent than not. The power dynamics of the oppressed America to the rest of the world are not the domestic power dynamics, they are the international power dynamics of America over its international peers. Hip hop and Hollywood movies are the same in this scenario. The difference Kyle highlights in the film is real and it matters... but it matters a lot more to Americans than to everyone else. So it is accurate... but it is structured, framed and parsed from a US perspective, where the granular detail is in the things that are up close to the watcher but far away to the speaker and not the other way around. It's natural, and kind of unavoidable. But it's still a thing that happens, and interesting to note.
@@mademedothis424 There's an old joke that if Americans can't tell a story where the USA is the hero, they will tell a story where the USA is the big bad villain. I think the more common phenomenon these days is people realizing that the uncomplicated heroic stories of America are at least untrue enough that they shouldn't be seen in a vacuum, and overcompensating to see all effects of America in the world as bad. The truly foreign idea to an American might be that they are just one of several characters and in the part of the story we're living in, the writers have been giving them a lot to do. But there was a lot of story before that and who knows how much still to come.
I'm Finnish-English bilingual (also I pretend to know how to speak Swedish) so yeah, this subject is always fun to me. the effect of American pop culture is very omnipresent. my favorite microcosm of it is that because the first exposure to the soft thick fabrick used for sweatpants and shirts was introduced through sweatshirts for American colleges, sweat pants are called "collegehousut" and shirts "collegepaita" (sidenote, and it's a bit of a class signifier wherther you pronounce it colij or kollegge) anyway, great video, I would say it rocked with an emoji but I'm on my laptop.
Speaking a little bit more to the Wifi (English) vs Wipi (Korean). In Korean, voicing is dependent upon adjacent sounds. Speaking linguistically, "f" vs "p", "k" vs "g", etc, are allophones in Korean. Basically, to a native Korean speaker, "f" and "p" are the same and change depending upon placement in the word. For example, the base word "kimchi" is actually pronounced with an initial "g" sound ("gimchi"), but when preceded by a consonant as in baekkimchi, it is pronounced with a "k". Thus, in written Korean, there is no distinction between voiced and unvoiced. There are other sounds that are distinct phonemes in Korean but allophones in English. For example, the "p" sound at the end of "stop" is not aspirated (no air expelled), but it is aspirated in "pasta". You can tell this by putting your hand in front of your mouth when you say the words. In Korean, aspirated vs non-aspirated are distinct phonemes, and therefore are separate letters in written Korean, but not in English. I emphasize with your language issues, but the way about it is to jump in and try to minimize "translation" - learn the rules as they are in absentia of your own native tongue. Unfortunately, the 2 languages you do speak (Dutch and English) are pretty much the same, so getting out of that box will take time. Honestly, I had an easier time learning Japanese than French as it was more of a clean slate.
Pausing this at 4:50 to say that one of the reasons why I prefer quality made fansubs is the fidelity to detail. They don't do the distasteful (and, imo, harmful) localization dance of swapping university names etc in favor of bringing out what the work wants to communicate. In a way, it's a form of respecting the audience's intelligence and curiosity, and the cultural context of the work being presented
That was an very thought provoking video. It made me think about Metal Gear Solid V, where the main goal of the antagonist is to make one unifying language for the world. The ending is chilling. As an Irish person, who can't speak his own mother tongue it makes me kind of ashamed of myself.
It's interesting to think that not only in Korean, but in Japanese as well, English loanwords effectively supplant native words for concepts that were already known to both cultures. Like, the traditional Japanese word for milk is gyūnyū (specifically referring to cow milk, but often used for just milk in general, as far as I know) and yet, especially in Japanese media, it's more common to hear the English loanword in the form of miruku (it's used more broadly for stuff that isn't just cow milk, but yeah). It becomes all the more terrifying when you understand that a lot of these loanwords began to take on wider usage during the Meiji Restoration, Japan's state-mandated Westernisation programme to resist European colonialism/begin their own colonisation of other Asian countries, including Korea.
(this is my Patreon comment, reworded with additions) I have a critique to make in how while film is examined and re-examined in its messages, themes, critiques, etc., music (or at least pop music) for many can't be examined as anything more than a product that exists solely to be marketable. Like film, like language, US music genres aren't just popular products to be actively stolen from (though that happens and Black art suffers the most from it), they are ubiquitous in the collective unconscious. And while music in the English language can easily trascend barriers worldwide (though factors like racism and cultural differences affect it), listeners and radio DJs and executives within the global music industry easily turn away music in other languages due to "not understanding it" (even if they don't understand English either), or neatly categorize music in other languages as inherently foreign even if there's little difference (K-pop, Latin pop/rock), or as "world music" to steal back from if some "spice" is needed, on a similar line to how Black artists tend to be relegated to "urban" categories. Before and after (and even during, with a Korean album that got pretty much ignored by a lot of Western critics and media, "BE") BTS' Dynamite/Butter/Permission to Dance English trilogy, they kept singing in Korean, even in collaborations with artists like Coldplay. By 2020 they had 7 years of music that contains direct tributes to the artists they were inspired by ("Hip-Hop Phile" directly names artists such as Nas, Kendrick, Biggie Smalls, among others, though that obviously doesn't automatically exempt them from critique), celebrations of their own culture ("Idol", "Ma City", "Satoori Rap"), critiques of social and often Korean-specific issues ("Baepsae", "Go Go", "Am I Wrong") and references to Western culture not just to be marketable, but to convey themes (the "Singin' in the Rain" references in "Boy With Luv" were part of their MAP OF THE SOUL series, a metacommentary on fame explicitly referencing Jung (using the concepts of Persona, Shadow and Ego); they followed "Boy With Luv" with "Black Swan", which both references Aronofsky and mirrors "Boy with Luv"). Just saying BTS is a product sold by "Korea" obscures the fact that they were from a small company, and are where they are not because South Korea pushed them, but because their fandom took an active, critical role in sharing and supporting their music, with entire blogs and pages of lyric translations and analysis. Despite fandom efforts since 2017, BTS' Korean music kept encountering barriers from the US and global music industry, with various radio DJs (note that radio has a crucial role in charting in the US) actually refusing to play their music until an English song came about. I often think of how, while Korea got sudden widespread access to US music in the late 80s when hip-hop and R&B were already popular, here in Chile (partly due to our censorship during the very white and Christian Pinochet dictatorship against leftist art, the latter of which had significant indigenous influences) pop, rap and especially rock music are very popular, with the most famous Chilean band being the The Clash-influenced and very politically outspoken Los Prisioneros, who satirized how they'd never reach the fame and glory of English-speaking musicians in "We Are Sudamerican Rockers". While shaped by colonialism, art with heavy Western-influence has been used both here and in South Korea as a form of expression and political resistance, not just a passive attempt of marketability. That's a factor that often feels like it's missing from this kind of conversations. Non-white artists from outside the US are expected to have this purely "ethnic" sound and are accused of being too "Westernized" for doing the art they want, even though Western art (unfortunately filtered through the white, cishet lens of the industry and the commodification of art as "American music") has shaped the cultural landscape almost everywhere by now, with different countries having their own currents of rock, pop and so on. This does not erase the issue of cultural appropriation: it coexists with it, feeds off it in a symbiosis of white, anglo hegemony.
"Given how hard it is to learn languages later in life, I likely never will." My dad learned English at 52, never say never. Also you visibly sweating as you pronounce Dakota words is a mood, as that was me last week while pronouncing Inupiaq words in my Native History class.
As for the Native American element, our director had this to say: "I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s a commentary on what happened in the United States, but it’s related in the sense that this family starts infiltrating the house and they already find a family living there. So you could say it’s a joke in that context. But at the same time, the Native Americans have a very complicated and long, deep history. But in this family, that story is reduced to a young boy's hobby and decoration. The boy’s mother mentions the tent as a U.S. imported good, and I think it’s like the Che Guevara T-shirts that people wear. They don’t know the life of the revolutionary figure, they just think it’s a cool T-shirt. That's what happens in our current time: The context and meaning behind these actual things only exists as a surface-level thing".
It’s always fascinating for me when I watch your videos, Kyle. In some ways, you’re a cracked mirror version of myself. Like you, I am from the DC area, lived in Europe in the early 2000s, and now reside in Queens. There’s a few key differences-I was born in 1995, so I’m a bit younger, and I lived in Germany, as opposed to the Netherlands-but there’s definitely overlap. You and I are even interested in the same topics. In this case, I’d considered posting an article about how languages change, and even get subsumed, by majority cultures, but using Norwegian, instead of Korean, as my subject. (My best friend is a writer from Oslo, who told me that 60% of all Norwegians are totally fluent in English, since they’re taught it from an early age, and that he even feels more comfortable writing in English than in Norwegian. But that’s besides the point). I don’t always agree with your arguments, but I am always happy to hear them. Keep up the good work. And if you ever need a fact-checker, let me know. :)
As someone from a small country that majorly consumes US and UK media, this video hit home. My country is currently having a sort of tourist and immigration boom, but they don't speak my language when they come over. English is more and more taking over my country's language which I know is probably inevitable and natural, but still it is also a bit sad.
Your ultimate point about ignorance is a hard one to sit with but if I can put a silver lining on that cloud: recognizing how limited our perspective is from within our own environment doesn't imbue the ability to speak someone else's story, but trying to amplify that story increases its range so those of us buried deeper have you as our entry into awareness that there is a source to seek. I'm realizing this is just me backwards engineering the meaning of "raising awareness" but as another ignorant American I'm glad to have my awareness raised by someone sympathetic to why we're like this and grateful I have access to broader perspective through you.
fascinating!!! an insight from another corner of the world, here in lithuania we have a language commission (i imagine every country does, but ours is weirdly prominent) the purpose of which is to literally police the usage of language to preserve its purity. this leads to some real awkward filmmaking since the visual language is almost entirely hollywood-inspired, characters use american turns of phrase, but are forced into lithuanian neologisms and grammar. i imagine it has roots in how long our country has been occupied and forced to speak russian, or even deeper when we shared deeper connections with poland, but nowadays the commission also works to fight americanisms too. funny, considering we want to be like the usa in almost every other way.
Refreshing as always! So few people in their video essays are truly honest about their shortcomings in an effort to have an authoritative trustworthy voice, which is unfortunate. Your honesty on the matter makes you feel more trustworthy, and leads one to examine other sources. You 🎸 🤘 🥌 👩🎤 🗿.
This video is super good. Honestly, you could probably make another entire essay just based on the fact that in Kpop's most popular girl group, Blackpink, three of the four members are fluent in English. That's probably not a coincidence.
again an amazing video essay! I grew up bilingual German and Dutch and later learned english in school. I always knew that the american culture and language have a firm grasp on our society. I never really asked myself why that really is. Also as a German speaker the cover version of Rammstein's "Amerika" rocks and gives a lot of meaning. Thank you for your work! 🪨 🤟
There's an essay in the collection Wired Ghosts And Robot Dreams that covers the way that use of loan words from specific sources in japanese media code for both particular character traits, themes, and indications of particular kinds of interactions. Specifically, overuse of loan words from european languages was used to code for upper class, socially sophisticated, rich, shallow, foreign, and stupid (often all at once) while loan words from chinese would code for learned but conservative. I'd be interested in seeing how the use of english loan words specifically changes its cultural valence by geographic region. (That collection is mostly pretty good, by the way. If you want to read academics say things about anime from the 80s and 90s, it's worth reading. Only two of the essays are howlingly absurd.)
oaahh this video made me so aware of the privilege of not being a native english speaker. defining loan words in the beginning of this video felt like silly, because it's a concept im so familiar with, like it's taught at school, it's like Basic to me. i remember multiple times in school teachers talking about the worry of increased loan words from english as new products, ideology, concepts and things are coming about so fast and there is little time for the language to develop words based in finnish and other things that have had words in finnish for centuries are becoming obselete, like a lot of farming equipment. online the pressure to speak english is the worst, like no one would read this comment if i wrote it in my mother tongue. and some usamericans will still assume u are from the states if u write in english, bc they just don't even understand the global power of the us.
:) it's so nice to see monolingual perspectives that actually *contend* with the monolingual privilege of living in a cultural landscape that is primarily constructed in English, even if the presenter isn't monolingual.
I watched this Hindi drama(?) once called Shakira: The End of Evil. Something I thought was interesting was that sometimes the characters would just say full sentences in English in the middle of their dialogue. I can't help but also think of early 2000's tokusatsu where "English is cool" was the rule. So there was just random English interspersed in the names of attacks in Super Sentai or Kamen Rider would have their various gadgets and devices voiced by English speaking actors.
i do not know what to do with the knowledge that you included a clip of Donald Duck casting Zetta Flare in Kingdom Hearts III in a video essay about Parasite but I love it.
Speaking of Donald Duck, you should look into how much Donald Duck have influenced Norwegian language and culture, especially through the Donald Duck comics that is the basis for most of the Ducktales cartoons. Donald Duck is practically a Norwegian folk icon despite being made in the USA
I really like your perspective! I feel like a lot of your videos could only be made by an american who has also spent a lot of their formative years outside of the USA, and as a non-american that's kind of a refreshing point of view haha!
Rewatched this after watching "Past Lives", made by a Korean Woman who immigrated when she was 12, about a Korean woman who immigrated to America when she was 12, and married an American, It's very much about this cultural tension but with a unique sense. Great video
The name changing thing, man. I teach high school and have a lot of Chinese students. One of them told me she went by Annie instead of her given name because a teacher in first grade gave her a list of names and told her to pick one. Yikes.
I have been here for four minutes and I am already confused about the American way of doing subtitles. As my native language is spoken by approximately 6 million people - which means the amount of people speaking it who are living outside of the country are so few they are not even a percentage - needless to say everything is subtitled. In fact anything that is geared for an audience that is old enough to read, will have subtitles as dubbing is not a thing. For that same reason there are a host of different rules to adhere to and one of them is that you do not translate place names or concepts into a native equivalent. English dominating other languages in its rose as the lingua franca is just something you live with when your language is basically anything not English or a language so big the country is self sustainable and even here the shift is happening. These days even French and Germans can speak English. Meanwhile my grandmother was taught English in school and most kids here know a ton of English before they even get to school where they will be taught two languages outside their mother tongue from 3rd grade (so 9-10 years old).
I had a similar experience when I got into anime in the early 00s and stumbled into the sub vs dub discourse. In Sweden, only little kids media (for ages 12 or younger) is ever dubbed, and our own film production is limited to say the least so most "cool" movies and shows are foreign media with subtitles. For me as a teenager, watching a dub was on par with watching the teletubbies and it was insane that anyone old enough to use the internet would *admit* that they watch a dubbed show for anything other than early childhood nostalgia reasons.
The most brutal way to answer that confusion is to strip it down and highlight that America doesn't have strict rules about how to localize media (beyond ensuring it matches age/content restrictions), because...we don't care. We hold the cultural hegemony, if you want to play on our court, make whatever choices you think will make it most appealing to us. It's kind of an even DARKER mirror of the bell hooks quote at the end of the video: we're not just going to steal your story and change it, we're going to make YOU change it to try and appease us. The only upside is that, in time, a lot of the more egregious examples of this kind of alteration becomes a kind of embarrassment: maybe in 20 years, people will think the alteration of "Yonsei" for Oxford is as ridiculous as changing "onigiri" to "Jelly doughnuts" in Pokemon.
@@AllWIllFall2Me well, most media creators outside of the anglophone sphere aren't interested in selling their media to the anglophone market. Music is probably the most exportable medium so pop artists prefer to sing in English for that sweet global streaming appeal, but movies and shows (and whatever the local counterpart to country music is) are usually made for the domestic market and if another country wants to buy it as well then that's just a bonus.
As always, fantastic video. But I have something to say about learning languages part: Started learning fourth language when I was 26. Now I'm 29 and I'm working in this language and living in the country, where this language is one of the two official languages. Don't give up language learning because "you are too old". P.S. Admittedly, all languages I speak or understand (so far) are from Indoeuropean family.
This is kinda insane, because I saw this video literally the day after I learnt that preschoolers in my nation have an easier time learning English than our nation language. The discussion surrounding this phenomenon is way different from what you present, as it is a sign of cultural and regional fragmentation and kids not having enough time to spend with friends and family, but also something categorically unavoidable when the world is growing more and more interconnected as we speak.
Based video indeed🗿I'm from Brazil and it's pretty common to use some loanwords from english. Actually, the more you are an "idealist/positivist" (like motivacional coaching or smth ), more you tend to use these words. In my opinion, that's the way the colonizer narrative stands. They make you feel comfortable and more respectful by using their words and making you believe the true-neutral society, almost from "nature", is the one who speaks english.
32:50 for those wondering, Vulture wrote about this joke. The given English subtitles actually are, "Mija! Try learning English, it opens new doors!" while the actual Korean line is "Mija! Also, my name is Koo Soon-bum," which is, according to Vulture, "like a white man saying his name is 'Buford Attaway'" and is "a clever subversion of the supremacy of English." Apparently yes, this joke is mistranslated in other ways, including another English subtitle saying "Mija! How's my Korean?" (both the character and actor playing him are Korean-American.)
So, is the joke that Koo Soon-bum is a name that sounds vaguely Korean, but is actually clearly fake and ridiculous, like how Buford Attaway sounds vaguely English but is clearly fake and ridiculous? (I'm not a native speaker of English)
🪨 France prides itself on being the "exception culturelle", at least it did throughout the 90's and 2000's. This expression meant that we were THE country which didn't let American influence ''pollute'' us. For a good chunk of it, it was empty posturing. Just closing our eyes on both other countries which had a strong nationnal culture, and on the ways Americana was actually influencing us. this concept had some reality to it. french movies stayed numerous and popular at home even to this day (of course american films are stronger these days, but not as much as you'd think). It also meant people would raise a tantrum at things like a disney park opening in france, while ignoring the ways our culture can squash productions of, for example, ex-colonies also, trying to flee other cultures makes our culture poorer.
There's a lot of talk in the Netherlands about how much we're using English in our day-to-day, when existing Dutch words would do just as well, or new Dutch words would make the language flourish, but, of course, it's not like the Netherlands hasn't played this role itself in the creation of Afrikaans, which, ironically, *is* pronounced, in English, the way it is in the language itself, whereas 'Nederlands' would sound incomprehensible to most English-speakers. I think a *lot* of languages suffer from this Anglification-creep, except for, as you touched on here, *French*, which *will* find new words instead of borrowing things from English, no matter *how* weird it ends up sounding. Anything to stop the reversal of that old colonial relationship, I suppose.
France also has an organization that controls their language which nearly nobody else fromalizes that way, but it comes with its own set of problems for French speakers who want to advance the language in their own "unofficial" ways.
I speak Spanish, most people’s i know only speak spanish yet we call this and most international movies by their English translated names. It’s complicated
It's telling when there's a popular game where players would play a simple game (usually ping pong) like normal. The only caveat is that if someone speaks a foreign word, their team's score changes to zero. Games have lasted literal hours and a lot of players default to the strategy, 'just don't talk'.
On a similar subject I have been really angered recently with so many youtubers who claim "I am not even going to try to pronounce that" is to try and make people feel better. Trust me, people feel better if you try and fail than if you just write off an entire language. I work in education with a lot of foreign workers and my line manager often just ignores names he can't pronounce, whcih I find insane because you cna just google how to pronounce almost all of them! I always make sure I do it, and if I mess up I mess up, but its better than them always being known as "this 32 year old learner" or whatever.
I remember when I first watched someone call out the BS in the whole faux kindness behind "I don't want to butcher your name." It was an American movie reviewer and she mentioned that an African actress had recently asked them: "If you are not going to even try saying my name because it is 'too difficult' and foreign to you... then why the hell do you always call Stelan Skaarsgard by his name? Is that an American name? It's funny that the whiter a foreign actor is, the more likely reviewers are to try...". After that she always made an effort to at least try and pronounce every actor's name.
Milton "Milt" Caniff was the cartoonist who created the Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon strips. Steve Canyon was still running when I was a kid. Thank you for making a Walter Wanger joke! I knew you wouldn't let me down. Your comedy is a precious commodity to me.
I'm going to be honest - I'm Australian. The part about colonialism within your own country and the relationship of language between conqueror and conquered is haunting to me. I'm part Aboriginal (or Indigenous, whatever you want to call it) and when I met someone from my tribe - a 2nd cousin - she informed me that our tribe's language no longer exists. Its far from the only example out there but it feels perverse. I mean for the obvious reason of "I am speaking the language of people who tried to genocide my ancestors" (My mother is "Stolen Generation" because she is white passing) but also Aboriginal stories are passed down orally. I have to ask what's lost in the translation from the original language to English? Language sometimes doesn't need a thousand years to change. Sometimes all it needs is a single generation.
I had a class on Korean culture, and there was an article that talked about American influence on the former, and that in turn, is now similarly affecting SE Asian countries like Thailand for example
Kind of true, Thailand has got a lot of cultural influence from Korea. KPop got really big in Thailand long before it was popular in the west, which is how Thai people like Lisa would end up in that industry. Of course, other cultures have been influential, especially Japan where things like anime was extremely huge and American culture prior to that
On a different note to my other comment, there's actually a 1977 essay by Marxist Venezuelan writer Ludovico Silva called "Comics and Their Ideology", where he criticizes US comics like The Phantom, Mandrake the Magician and yes, Donald Duck comics from an anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist perspective haha
I have no idea how to do a rock emoji in UA-cam so I'll just type ROCK and hope that suffices. This was a really good video, and it got me thinking about a lot of things...like, say for example this comment. That I am writing in English. On UA-cam - an American website, under a video by an American talking about American words in a Korea movie. And this is an odd experience, is it not, for me. Because I am not American. I am in fact not from any nation that has English as a primary or even secondary language. I'm Bulgarian, and yet here we are. Watching a video in a foreign language about languages foreign to the foreign language speaker's culture. It's all fucking weird, isn't it. Anyway, half-baked introspection aside, good job Kyle, I am glad you are still making videos. I really am. Keep it up!
🪨 I don't see why any of this is much of a problem beyond the somber tone it's conveyed. Language contains the record of conquered and conqueror, and war has been an eternal fact of human existence since forever; the contextualization and mutability of language throughout cultures becomes another facet of humanity. I'm unsure what to make of the conclusion 'isn't it interesting how conquest shapes culture, including language?' Yeah. It's interesting to know and recognize, I guess?
The part about Jane Fonda using the English name of the movie rather than the Korean name reminded me of something I noticed when I lived in South Korea. They rarely translated the names of English movies, they only transliterated them into Korean characters, so Koreans could read the titles, but unless they spoke English well, they might not know what the title meant. It made me wonder if we did the same in the US, if I would even be able to remember the titles of films like Chinjeolhan Geumja-ssi, even when romanized. Also, to bring in Pulp Fiction and another form of American culture with global reach, a Quarter Pounder was a called a Quarter Pounder in Korea, despite the words being rather clumsy to say in Korean and Koreans not using pounds as a unit of measure.
35:14 I mean... we do this with other languages too. You mentioned William the Conqueror when it's actually Guillaume, with European names we translate them, with native names we would often say them literally, a practice that is fading as we hear more native voices, which I think is a good thing, literal names kind of sound silly... the point being, it's not an ominous or terrible thing that we call William the Conqueror William instead of Guillaume. Nor is it a bad thing when the Japanese call William, Wiriamu. The point I'm making here is accentuated to it's maximum extent with your montage at 40:30. The point being that if Korean adopted more English words.... it will sound the way English sounds today with its many French loanwords... and there won't be any problem with that. Why does it matter how many English loanwords are in Korean especially since (if it's anything like Japanese) these English loanwords are adopted by youth voluntarily with no prodding from the actual United States. Same thing happens in French Canada, more and more English loanwords are entering French Canada and this is due to the ongoing conquest of French Canada from English Canada, an ongoing phenomenon, and the people who cry out against that, instituting language policies that defend the native culture of French Canada are the types of people that you would malign as being reactionary racists. This leads to another question... you critique the United States' role in the Americanisation of Cinema, but then... what is ''authentic'' Korean cinema to begin with? I mean is anything other than the most stereotypical asian drone with ancient medieval instruments just ''americinized'' korean music? Does ''authentic'' korean music not exist? What would that constitute?
"no prodding from the actual United States"? Seriously? Hollywood gets massive state sponsorship in many forms, including hefty tax benefits as well as access to military hardware and personnel, specifically because it allows the US to dominate foreign entertainment markets. And I do not use 'dominate' lightly here: Finnkino, the company that has an effective monopoly on movie theaters and distribution here in Finland, is owned by AMC. Finnkino has refused to show Finnish movies in favor of American ones. Sure, loanwords and cultural influence will occur, and that's basically a good thing. But what US cultural hegemony does is limit our exposure to any other cultures, thereby forcing us to adopt their loanwords and their influence. That is the logical result of subjecting media to capitalism - markets tend toward monopolies.
@@MuadMouse alright. Well for one, not sure if the situation is the same in Korea, Korea has tons of Korean made pop culture... So I imagine that it wouldn't be difficult to only consume Korean made stuff if you really wanted to (easier than Finnish stuff in Finland I would imagine). Could be wrong on that though I will admit. And second, even in the case of Finland the adoption of loanwords by the populace would be voluntary. It's not like native american cultural genocide where you dissensentivise the speaking of the native tongue and get punished. Watching tons of foreign films doesn't force you to adopt loanwords, otherwise every weeb would start adopting Japanese words into their English vocabulary.
(this became an essay/rant barely connected to the video oh god i am so sorry) oh this is an excellent video, the way that languages take, learn, borrow, and colonise eachother is so interesting, im currently trying to learn welsh and it's so interesting to see which words are mutually understandible, and then wonder if that's due to proximity to anglo-saxon linguistic development over the centuries, or enforced by the ruling/colonsing class. That bell hooks quote is really interesting. I'm Australian, as an Australian we share the same language as America (mostly, we're both austensible anglophone contries after all) but the language of images, of symbolism, of the land itself is so fundimentally different between us and yet here we just kind of accept it and embrase the american gaze. we have to if we want entertainment; we watch wintery chistmas movies when most of us are trying not to get heat stroke on christmas day, we hear Katy Perry songs about the 4th of July when we have never declared any independace from the crown, we just kind of deal with these learn Americanisms. where as, until recently and only barely, America only accepts out own visions of the country through the lense of dystopia, exploitation or purposeful marketing (see: Mad Max and Crocodile Dundee), and this specific lense has been sold back to us over and over again in the Junkrat's, Crash Bandicoot's and Chuck Hanson from Pacific Rim's of the American world. One of the the Australian Game Dev/writer behind the game 'Necrobarista' wrote a medium article a few years back about something they labled the 'Uncanny Valley of Culture', in that Americans will see something made by and australian and while we accept it as normal, they american viewer will see something in english and will read it in a completly unintended way, for example the game Necrobarista opens with a title card that reads 'the terminal, Carlton Victoria, Australia 3053', and at least one player of the game read that number as a year. It's a post code. Almost all music, film and other art from this country that wants to be big in american has to make the choice of being australian or being palatble to an american audiance even the origional mad max had mel gibson re-dub himself with an american accent, I notice it when someone sings in an Australian accent. though this is slowly changing with things like the heartbreak high reboot which is so unapolgetically Australian. As a white anglo australian I also realise that i have privalage of in this discussion, as a part of the countries dominant voice whilst people in other groups are barely even heard here. If america barely get's white anglo Australia right what hope does it have for everyone else who lives here? It is astounding to me that the first Asian australia actor using their australian accent in american media has been from ARCANE of all things, to say nothing of how american superhero films have characters who are Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander's portrayed by black europeans (the Wizard in SHAZAM being the big one imo, given that he's a Dreaming spirit in the comics the film was drawing from, Bishop in Days of Future falls into this), because the white hollywood gaze only sees the phenotypical similaries between groups and thus casts them from the same pool of actors. obviously the cultural imperialsim of Australia by American is fundimentally different the that which happens in Korea. Australia is a colonialsit nation, Sovereignty has never been ceded, It always was and always will be, Aboriginal land. the fact remains that there are parallels between these situations. it is telling about how much America pushes even into countries and 'cultures' that white supremacy deems similar. also off topic from the rest of the comment; it's very interesting to me that 'Naur' phonetic transcription of australians saying 'no' (tho i cannot hear the 'aur' sound for the life of me, but i think my own name sounds fundimentally different coming from an american voice so whatever lol) rose to such prominace on twitter dot hell because of K-Pop fandom talking about the accent of australian born k-pop idols🪨🪨
Proper words in a tongue you're not used to is always hard. (Korean is actually considered one of the harder languages to learn, next to Russian. English....isn't hard, it just generally doesn't make any sense). I studied Japanese in high school and college, and I tend to cook with ingredients more common in the Pacific Rim. Which means I can rattle off ingredients from non-English languages pretty well, but...my mom can't. She struggles with words like "kabocha" or "chijimisai". Both of which have perfectly useful English terms (it's just pumpkin and spinach). But that's just cooking. That's not actual names. Recently at work, two employees had names that were....not common for white people. They also used names that were easier to pronounce for people, and I know at least one of the two actually picked the second name for a specific reason. So then which is better? Struggling through someone's given name? Mispronouncing a given name or using a name that, even if it's not their given name, they're at least happy with? Is any of that even relevant compared to the frustration of having someone mispronounce your name every day? I don't know, language is hard, this video is good.
This might be one of my favorite videos you’ve done. Just the fact that so many other cultures expect children to learn English very young and make sure they get good at it as they grow up, but we don’t teach American children learn other languages until high school and college, because getting good at other languages aren’t treated as a priority in American school systems.
This is an amazing piece of art. I loved everything about it, and not only thought me something, but made me intrigued to learn more. Thank you so much for your amazing work! 🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽
As someone who is born in Hong Kong I'm extremely familiar with how Hong Kongers just casually codeswitch into English quite often during conversations. But its mostly done by Gen X-ers and millennials.
Fantastic video, Kyle! I really appreciated you pointing out the indigenous appropriating the family casually partakes in and the language they use (like tent instead of teepee)
I might have misheard since I don’t speak Korean, but if I heard correctly the term the mother (I guess, haven’t gotten round to see the movie yet sadly) used for fanboy was “otaku”, which in case was borrowed from Japanese. Just found it interesting considering the theme of the essay. Also, great work as usual. You are my favourite 🪨🤘
Fantastic video as always, count me as a subscriber now. The part where you compared words originating from Old English to words originating from the aristocratic French blew this English major's mind. 🎸 (that's the rock you mean, right?)
21:07 In case you weren't being facetious, Milton Caniff was a cartoonist who created the hugely popular newspaper comic strip Terry and the Pirates. That strip, and other action and adventure comic strips of the 1930s, were so popular that they led directly to the creation of the comic book. It seems weird now for Wanger to include him in that list, but back then comic strips and comic books were big business. Terry and the Pirates is also pretty difficult to read these days, as the titular pirates were Chinese, and were horrible Asian stereotypes. Their leader was literally named Dragon Lady, and I'm fairly certain the trope of the same name was named after her. Terry and the heroes of the strip travel around with a Chinese man named Connie (which is short for his chosen English name George Webster Confucius), who I can only describe as something from one of those World War II anti-Japan propaganda posters. It's pretty bad, but was probably the most popular comic strip of its time, and it ran for around 40 years (though Caniff left the strip in 1946 to create another one, Steve Canyon).
(edit: [rock emoji]) I'm not quite through the video yet, but Kyle mentioned how French loan words in English are considered fancier than the Old English words. I just want to note that English loan words in other languages are unlikely to have the same status as French loan words because the *context* of the borrowed linguistics matter. In Sweden we also imported a lot of French words and they are fancy - because they were brought in and used by aristocracy. However, we also have a substantial amount of *Germanic* loan words because in the 1450s one third of the middle class people in Stockholm were from what is now Germany. We were actively encouraging German craftsmen to immigrate (because we really needed the craftsmen) and Swedish cities were effectively Swedish-German bilingual. That said, our German loan-words do not have the same status as the French loan-words. The German loan-words are terminology related to middle class craftsmen. Our French loan-words are terminology related to the fancies of nobility. Today most of our new loan-words are from English, and it's hard to pin down in the moment what "class" these loan-words will have as a group while we are still actively importing more and more words. While I'm not familiar with Korean, I suspect they too will continue importing more English loan-words in the foreseeable future. But subjectively I don't feel like English loan-words have the high-status flair of French loan-words. One thing I can say though, is that *Americans don't need to feel white guilt over English loan-words abroad.* Whatever our reason for adopting this or that foreign word, it was our choice to adopt that word. We could have chosen to translate the words to a correct native counterpart (some languages are very insistent on that practise) but every loan-word is incorporated in a language for a reason, consciously or subconsciously. We are doing this to our own languages, it's not your fault.
Oh yeah, something I've noticed with when speaking swedish, is how often we switch to english to emphasize certain words or phrases. There was a small period where I would cringe over the overuse of english in kpop and latin pop, before realizing that it has happened all the time in swedish hiphop for over 20 years. 'The botten is nådd' is pure swenglish
This is always such a fascinating topic. As someone who's first language is German (slightly ironic, given the ending credits) and only speaks one other language well (can you guess which? xD) but has attempted to learn several other languages, it's really disheartening how difficult language acquisition is and how it does create such a barrier to the rest of the world, this little rock 🪨floating in space we live on. Still, there's a certain degree of realism to be had. The limit of human linguistic faculties mean that approximations, be they translations or mangled pronounciation attempts, are what will have to make due at times when we learn about or interact with other people and their cultural artifacts... Unless we manage to create a universal translator that can move our tongues for us in order to ensure that we both UNDERSTAND and PRONOUNCE correctly.
I've always thought there are few people in this world as concerned and as ashamed of American cultural imperialism as the American themselves. I wonder if someone someday should have a look at the idea that a simple "we're teaching you our language" à la Caliban's quote, at the end of your video, is an oversimplifciation that denies whatever agency is left to non-English speakers in their own choices of what languages to learn. It is true that there is a pressure towards English -- anything successful will create the pressure for imitation, including linguistic imitation (consider American anime fans using Japanese words like "kawaii" or "tsundere"), and there's a lot to be said about the unfairness of this fact. It is equally true that being able to imitate the successful elements around ourselves is precisely the way in which success spreads to places other than the so-called "imperialistic centers" -- which means that someday Korea, Japan, or China might well overtake Hollywood and become more culturally important than Hollywood ever was, and that part of the reason why this "breaking free" was possible would be ... the conscious imitation and borrowing of 'what works'. It's so easy to forget that those who imitate also have agency, even when they imitate. Korean K-pop groups going "yeah baby!" are not just recording devices faithfully reproducing noise from their memories. They are actual people making choices, often in arguably unfair circumstances, but choices nonetheless. I wished we'd give more attention to this fact when considering how cultural influence happens. (Do you know how much borrowing, imitation, and 'cultural colonization' there was between North American Amerindian groups, for instance -- and how many conflicts underlie it? How many situations that might strike us as 'unfair'? Yet it is so difficult for us to look at a Lakhota word and not think that it represents something pure and pristine... when it might as well be a cultural borrowing from Mohawk, Comanche, or Blackfoot... and how we should react to it in case it turns out to be true?...)
I’m currently teaching in an environment where almost half of the students in the entire school (three grades) is an English Language Learner, at various levels. I’ve always understood that English is one of the hardest languages to learn because there are so many spelling/grammar rules that don’t make any sense. This video, however, reminded me how insidious American English can be in languages around the world. Kyle, as always, you’ve given me a wealth of food for thought. Thank you ❤.
Huh, my emojis don't seem to work, so, :rock: EDIT: Okay, so it felt really wrong to just leave my comment at that on a 9-month-old masterpiece of a video, so I want to add that, as much as I still love seeing videos that keep pointing out all the various kinds of symbols, cinematic language, character subtleties, and etc. of Parasite, this is the first video that felt truly unique. It covers an aspect of the film and our culture that is literally staring us in the face for English-speakers, yet no one really voices (pun unintended). This video sparked more conversation amongst my family than any other about Parasite and also helped us finally answer a long-standing dinner-table question: why does America hold the pop-culture monopoly? Guess we super underestimated WWII. It made me re-examine the languages I speak, especially as a French-English speaker who wondered why there were so many French loanwords in English. So, thank you as always Kyle for your incredible research and insight, and for giving me hours and hours of food for thought :)
Thanks to HelloFresh for sponsoring today's video. Go to strms.net/KylekallgrenbhhHelloFreshOctoberYT for 65% off plus free shipping on your first box!
To quote comedian and advertising executive Stan Freberg: "Eat Food. It's good."
This kidna reminds me of how characters of War and Peace would regularly switch between Russian and French and how that would characterize them
Ah yes the old Slavophile and Western Modernist divide between Russian elites. If more Americans knew about this they would have a better understanding of Russia and its politics.
That actually surprised me when I read it
Yeah, in Anna Karenina too. According to Tolstoï, Russian nobility were big into code switching.
That's actually a Thing in Russian literature!! I remember it was a big thing with Pushkin, I don't remember if it started before him or if he's the trope codifier, but there's a big "French symbolizes this person is not attached to their Russian roots and are therefore fake and plastic" theme in Russian lit.
(Sorry if you already knew this, I got excited, hope I'm not mansplaining Russian lit to you lol)
Yelene vs Hélène
It's amazing how opening with Duolingo "correct" and "lesson complete" sounds trigger some pavlovian rush of dopamine through my brain.
This is probably more of a reflection on the fact that I'm a unilingual anglophone, but I noticed something else about this movie's use of English. There's a tendency among the characters to use English as a way to show off (imo) or to get one over on someone else; in one instance, when Mrs. Park says "Is that okay with you?", she's trying to see if Jessica is actually fluent or not. The only person who uses English in a sincere way (the "Respect!" guy) is batshit insane. I don't know how accurate I'm being here, but English in Parasite might be the language of bullshit.
It's like that in German media too, because of the internet there are a lot more English words from tech or business jargon that have infiltrated the German language and in TV shows they make insincere or vain characters like hipsters, politicians or business men, overuse English for comedic effect.
That's quite an interesting idea, actually.
As a Korean American, this video explored so much of my history that wasn't taught to me. The ways in which colonialism affects us. Things Korean Americans don't talk about. This was so cathartic to have someone understand how weird it is to be korean in today's society. Thank you. (Like low-key almost cried watching this) ❤.
Cosplay is a super interesting one because, whilst it's undoubtedly an English word, it is - along with salaryman - an example of 和製英語 or 'English made in Japan'. So it is a Japanese word also, arguably an English loan word into English, as well as Korean. Of course, this only underscores the points made in the video.
Hoo boy, yeah, it's rather difficult from the outside looking in, with Japanese loanwords, because they don't use it like English. First I need to read a word slowly, know which letters to delete to have it make sense, and then use context to know what it means. It's not so-fu-to sa-vu, it's soft serve, and it means ice cream. It's written as bai-to, taken from German Arbeit, which means "work", but here it means "part-time worker". It's a giant struggle from time to time.
@@TheDanishGuyReviews "I went to a Vietnamese cafe for a coffee, and a banh mi and pain au chocolat." the swapping back and forth of words is everywhere if you look for it
@@lindsayj2389 How do you mean? That loan words are everywhere? I think the difference is cultural in your sentence, since I know what a café, a coffee, and a pain au chocolat is already.
Well, the thing is loan words referring to specific foods also often have the habit of diverting in meaning quite significantly. See how cutlet goes into japanese to mean "deep-fried breaded (usu. pork) cutlet" and then goes back to English to mean (especially in the UK) a curry sauce, that doesn't necessarily bear any close resemblance to japanese curry sauce (which is also an import from India - as is the word curry). Or to give an example the other way, langue du chat biscuits are popular in Japan, but they're not even shaped like the cats tongue the french name refers to, and are instead two rectangular biscuits with chocolate sandwiched between. Anyway, English also adopts loan words into its lexicon that are used in strikingly different ways to the word in the original language. That's just part of language.
My point was that English has such a position as a world language that new English words regularly get coined outside of countries where English is widely spoken as a first language. Japanese is well known for this, but of course it happens all over. For example, in India you might hear someone say "prepone" instead of "bring forward".
@@TheDanishGuyReviews more that the same word is loaned into the English language multiple times from different sources, and with different ultimate meanings. cafe and coffee are doublets
the history of French colonialism intersects with the history of American imperialism in the English loanword banh mi, while its doublet pain is paired with the word chocolat, whose etymon was acquired with the colonisation of the Americas. there is a lot of history in each of the closely related words in that sentence
🪨 No joke, when William Wanger said “We don’t do Nationalism” I bursted out laughing even before the “Yankee Doodle Dandy” clip played.
Excellent work as always, Kyle.
As a psychology and linguistics student... it's only more difficult to learn a second language because you have to do it _consciously_ instead of unconsciously. It has nothing to do with age or anything, so don't let it hold you back. Go out there and learn, my friends! Learn all of the things!
Jeez where do you linguistics students that don’t know about the critical period of language acquisition come from? It’s the worst “pop science” myth to spread about linguistics in the last couple of years that sets L2 students up for disappointment when they are worse than a toddler in their target language after years of trying
@@everwhatever Aren't there papers out there that proves language acquisition depends on input? How would you describe the process of learning a new language?
@@cagdasmuldur250 are there? What are their names and authors? Of course language acquisition depends on input, but even full language immersion as an adult will not lead to the speed, accuracy and effortlessness with which a 5 year old has complete command of their native language. And yea, if you read them more books or have them learn the alphabet early they may know more words, or score higher on some tests, but even a child that grows like a weed with no one specifically teaching them still acquires the language at essentially the same speed.
Yeah, like, as a swede who spends all my time online, despite english only being my second language I tend to have an easier time finding words in english than swedish these days. Not even for a lack of swedish words to use, I don't actually have a need for loanwords most of the time, but bc I simply forget words in my own language!
And my pronunciation is way better than some of my peers, bc I immerse myself in the language 24/7.
I actually struggled with english in middle school, mostly bc all we did was memorizing words and watch One Tree Hill for some reason. (didn't help that swedish schools did the switch from teaching UK to US english during my time in school. suddenly we weren't supposed to spell it "colour" anymore!)
But during high school I both started going online alot more and my education was alot better, felt weird when I knew the word "oven" but a classmate of mine didn't. (especially since it's not that far from the swedish word for it, "ugn")
Point being, I feel like I ended up learning english both consciously _and_ subconsciously. Which I imagine is the case for most ppl today who's got english as their second language, at least in the west, but to what degree still rly depends on how much you interact with ppl and media online on an international level.
let's be honest, it's harder for several other reasons. there's almost certainly neurophysiological advantages as an infant. then there's having to do things like work and care for yourself, which creates a huge differential in the actual time you can dedicate. then there's all the factors that are inherently different between L1 and L2 acquisition even for children. even if you can afford to move for a year or two and immerse yourself in the language completely, an adult can't expect to reach fluency in a timeframe anywhere near that of a young child.
also i don't know for certain but I really doubt that L1 acquisition is unconscious.
This made me remember an anecdote from when I was a kid:
This happened when I was in first grade, back then I was good at English class which all my teachers saw as a great thing, I'm from Mexico and, much like in Korea, English is seen as a very important asset to secure a good paying job (and much like in Korea, it is hardly as great an asset as it seems). One of my teachers was so enamored with the idea that I was good at English that she began calling me "Maurice", because, as she explained, that was how my name was pronounced in English (My name is Mauricio).
Anyway, at some point, I remember telling my mom that the teacher used to call me Maurice and my mom got really angry and told me to always correct my teacher and tell her to use my real given name.
I didn't understand why my mom was so upset about the teacher changing my name... Today I do.
If I have a student whose L1 is Spanish, I always try to use what I remember from my high school Spanish classes to make the material easier to understand. That’s what culturally responsive teaching is supposed to be about- quite literally responding to the cultures that enter your room. I’m sorry that your teacher didn’t permit you the full beauty of your name.
@@hannahmoran3660 I don't think they didn't "permit" it.
@@seanbirch That’s fair, I’m sorry for assuming. I’ve had experiences before where teachers give up on pronouncing a student’s name properly because “it’s just too difficult”
I find it ironic that your teacher considered "Maurice" the English form of "Mauricio". My Cajun French great-grandfather was given the name "Maurice" at birth and Anglicized it to "Morris" as an adult. Cajuns Anglicizing their names was very common in that generation, as evidenced by the fact I have another great-grandfather who was born "Andre" and died "Andrew". In the United States, even other colonizers can be the wrong kind of white and be colonized.
Kyle, if it's any consolation, it is extremely difficult on a deep neurophysiological level for *anyone* to correctly pronounce many words and names in a language which is phonologically very different from their own without extensive practice. In the process of learning a native language as a child, the brain develops in such a way that certain phonemes common in unrelated languages are literally not even heard in their original form.
It helps to be very conciuous of your mouth and throat, practise sounds over and over, speacially the nuances of vowels, you'll learn to pronounce most things pretty decetly without terrible effort
As a native speaker of Korean and an aspiring Korean language teacher, this was very thought-provoking video essay! I didn't expect to hear 김구's famous quote, which is used here quite often to boost national/cultural pride how Korean culture has become influencial worldwide. Which makes this vid much more meaningful to Korean audience as we pay less attention towards 'other' culture except for the American one(But this concept of American-ness is clearly limited, as Black American pop culture hardly gets the credit for Kpop industry). Hallyu or Kpop fans are more likely to be motivated to learn Korean, so I think there must be similar power dynamics in between Korean and Kpop fans from 'other' countries, for example SA or SEA culture. I wish I could add Korean subtitle in your vid so it gets access to Korean as well. Appreciate your efforts to make this video essay. And you got new subscriber.
+ You have no idea how many times I had to endure not to put "sorry for my bad Eng" phrase, which I just did now lol
++ Never say never to learn new languages if you want to! My mom is almost 60 yrs now and she has more than 300 days streak in Duolingo Spanish. Tho she wouldn't say she 'speaks' Spanish, she said it makes her happy bcuz it brings the joy of learning something new in her age.
I was particularly fascinated with your analogy of the Old French vs the Old English. "What will Korean sound like in 1,000 years?" Suddenly i remembered: you've touched on this before! Cloud Atlas: Subspeak and Consumer.
I found it interesting when you mentioned Americans "fawning over foreign things not realizing it's our own culture being sold back to us" because it's something I've become keenly aware of lately and have been wanting to have a discussion with someone about. I've been watching a lot of K-Drama's on Netflix recently and many of those I've watched either were historical, partly historical, or made reference to historical things. As a result, I know so much more about Korean history than I was ever curious to learn previously. And in learning about their history it strikes me that while they succeeded in maintaining their unique culture in some ways, in others they have been very Westernized. And it's fascinating to me seeing so many ways they are familiar to me and my culture, vs the things that juxtapose against Western culture, as well as the many many ways the two are weirdly blended. It makes me wonder how much they themselves are aware of it.
Gossip Girl has an Indonesian adaptation (Gossip Girl Indonesia). The rich characters (Serena and Blair mostly) would switch between English and Indonesian, and the less wealthy characters (Dan) would speak exclusively in Indonesian. His sister Jenny wants to get into the in crowd so she starts speaking more English as well.
I love how you categorize "Pizza", "Trauma" and "Pasta" as English words when they're loan words in their own right, though made widespread by their American use.
Words that came by people immigrating to America.
I mean here in the Philippines, historically one of the products of 50 years of direct American Imperial interventions. English is not only deeply present but is the official medium beyond primary school and government transactions. Culturally, it holds the distinction as badge of class privilege and afront reminder of the colonizers. Like in Korea, we code-switch more frequently. From personal (admittedly middle class) experience, speaking English fluently (especially it it's in an American accent/cadence) there has been an implicit social assumption of class and intelligence. But when speaking English in a more Filipino accent, its shifts in more derogatory tone of "being a social climber" or trying to invade into elite spaces. The point being is that, seeing this video just reminds me again of America's hegemony and its marks colonial it has left on my country
🪨 On the subject of cultural imperialism in the Korean Peninsula, I am reminded of how during the years following the Korean War, each half of the region was ruled, respectively, by a craven bureaucrat who on his assumption of power had spent so many years in the barracks of Soviet partisans that he was more fluent in Russian than his native Korean (Kim Il-Sung); and a rabid ideological fascist, shocking even to his former superiors, who willingly joined the Imperial Japanese Army to suppress his own people (Park Chung-Hee). What outside empires and their loyal servants have done to the Korean people can scarcely be calculated. "The red plague rid you for learning me your language," indeed.
Very fitting that Kyle had a cover of “Amerika” by Rammstein over his end credits as it’s about the same thing as he’s been discussing: American culture universality. Brilliant idea.
I was thinking of Rammstein's "Amerika" throughout the video and I loved that you covered it at the end
"It's true that non-American artists have broken though, but they've done so by adopting American affectations." Oh, it goes deeper, when you consider that a lot of k-pop is written and composed by swedish and norweigan producers. I think i recall one korean label executive saying in an interview, that scandinavian producers seems to understand what made american R&B 'click' better than even the americans themselves did
Huh. As a non-American it's bizarre to see this whole thing never say anything... wrong, and yet be so entirely and completely made from an American perspective.
Like, the phrases being highlighted aren't all the same, but they're all highlighted. The use of non-white elements is seen from American racial categories. The application of the concept of "code-switching" to the use of English words or phrases. The conflating of loan words with English speech.
None of it is wrong, all of it is fundamentally American. And self-aware, too, which I appreciate, but still American and not quite grasping what the non-American version would be.
Look, I've spent the last decade and a half of my life working in English and speaking it more than my native language, and I live in a place that doesn't natively speak either. My perspective is... not averaage, but also not unique. It is, though, extremely different to the perspective of this piece. I am more aware than most of what the anglosphere is like, and yet I can't really understand its point of view fully.
Makes for an interesting video essay, if maybe for different reasons than originally planned.
You wanna be a little more specific on how you disagree with this perspective, or are you content to just declare it doesn't apply to you?
@@einootspork I specifically said I don't disagree. None of it is wrong.
I am saying the *framing* is extremely American.
Those are subtly different, but the difference is very important.
There are a few things that could be construed as being incorrect or missing cultural details here and there, like the specifics of how each instance of English reads, which ones play as loan words and which ones have been naturalized to the point where they don't read as English and whatnot, but those are both trivial and acknowledged in the video multiple times.
The framing, though? The framing is very US-specific. US-centric, at times. Like how the adoption of white cultural tropes is recognized as colonialism, but the adoption of cultural tropes from racial minorities is framed as appropriation. Is the difference real? Yes. Does it make sense? Sure, particularly inside the US. Is that a concern outside the US? Often, no. American music is often perceived as American music, regardless, in the same way, say, people think about flamenco or manele as "Spanish music" or "Romanian music" instead of a cultural expression specifically coded to improverished, segregated racial minorities in those countries. It all feels "foreign" from other places, and it all feels just as intrussive and haegemonic as each other, more oftent than not.
The power dynamics of the oppressed America to the rest of the world are not the domestic power dynamics, they are the international power dynamics of America over its international peers. Hip hop and Hollywood movies are the same in this scenario. The difference Kyle highlights in the film is real and it matters... but it matters a lot more to Americans than to everyone else.
So it is accurate... but it is structured, framed and parsed from a US perspective, where the granular detail is in the things that are up close to the watcher but far away to the speaker and not the other way around.
It's natural, and kind of unavoidable. But it's still a thing that happens, and interesting to note.
@@mademedothis424 There's an old joke that if Americans can't tell a story where the USA is the hero, they will tell a story where the USA is the big bad villain. I think the more common phenomenon these days is people realizing that the uncomplicated heroic stories of America are at least untrue enough that they shouldn't be seen in a vacuum, and overcompensating to see all effects of America in the world as bad. The truly foreign idea to an American might be that they are just one of several characters and in the part of the story we're living in, the writers have been giving them a lot to do. But there was a lot of story before that and who knows how much still to come.
@@mademedothis424 Thanks for explaining your problems with the video, I found it enlightening.
@@Lexivor Don't know if they're problems. They're certainly observations. I'm glad if they are interesting observations.
I'm Finnish-English bilingual (also I pretend to know how to speak Swedish) so yeah, this subject is always fun to me. the effect of American pop culture is very omnipresent. my favorite microcosm of it is that because the first exposure to the soft thick fabrick used for sweatpants and shirts was introduced through sweatshirts for American colleges, sweat pants are called "collegehousut" and shirts "collegepaita" (sidenote, and it's a bit of a class signifier wherther you pronounce it colij or kollegge)
anyway, great video, I would say it rocked with an emoji but I'm on my laptop.
My partner and I are both Finnish. My mother tongue is Swedish, hers in Finnish, and we communicate using American English.
@@sandorenckell5259 Very interesting (and adorable)!
Funniest part of this is, finnish school system doesn't have collages!
Speaking a little bit more to the Wifi (English) vs Wipi (Korean). In Korean, voicing is dependent upon adjacent sounds. Speaking linguistically, "f" vs "p", "k" vs "g", etc, are allophones in Korean. Basically, to a native Korean speaker, "f" and "p" are the same and change depending upon placement in the word. For example, the base word "kimchi" is actually pronounced with an initial "g" sound ("gimchi"), but when preceded by a consonant as in baekkimchi, it is pronounced with a "k". Thus, in written Korean, there is no distinction between voiced and unvoiced.
There are other sounds that are distinct phonemes in Korean but allophones in English. For example, the "p" sound at the end of "stop" is not aspirated (no air expelled), but it is aspirated in "pasta". You can tell this by putting your hand in front of your mouth when you say the words. In Korean, aspirated vs non-aspirated are distinct phonemes, and therefore are separate letters in written Korean, but not in English.
I emphasize with your language issues, but the way about it is to jump in and try to minimize "translation" - learn the rules as they are in absentia of your own native tongue. Unfortunately, the 2 languages you do speak (Dutch and English) are pretty much the same, so getting out of that box will take time. Honestly, I had an easier time learning Japanese than French as it was more of a clean slate.
Pausing this at 4:50 to say that one of the reasons why I prefer quality made fansubs is the fidelity to detail. They don't do the distasteful (and, imo, harmful) localization dance of swapping university names etc in favor of bringing out what the work wants to communicate. In a way, it's a form of respecting the audience's intelligence and curiosity, and the cultural context of the work being presented
That was an very thought provoking video. It made me think about Metal Gear Solid V, where the main goal of the antagonist is to make one unifying language for the world. The ending is chilling. As an Irish person, who can't speak his own mother tongue it makes me kind of ashamed of myself.
Yeah Kyle noticed the link in the live chat.
If it makes you feel better, I'm a Filipino woman who can't speak or understand Tagalog...
I relate to that feeling, I'm a Bengali guy who's ability to speak Bengali has deteriorated to almost nothing.
It's interesting to think that not only in Korean, but in Japanese as well, English loanwords effectively supplant native words for concepts that were already known to both cultures. Like, the traditional Japanese word for milk is gyūnyū (specifically referring to cow milk, but often used for just milk in general, as far as I know) and yet, especially in Japanese media, it's more common to hear the English loanword in the form of miruku (it's used more broadly for stuff that isn't just cow milk, but yeah). It becomes all the more terrifying when you understand that a lot of these loanwords began to take on wider usage during the Meiji Restoration, Japan's state-mandated Westernisation programme to resist European colonialism/begin their own colonisation of other Asian countries, including Korea.
Honestly Parasite is probably my favorite film from the 2010's. To me it's about as perfect as films can get
I . . . man you are good at your job, man. I wasn't expecting this to absorb me as much as it did. Thank you.
(this is my Patreon comment, reworded with additions)
I have a critique to make in how while film is examined and re-examined in its messages, themes, critiques, etc., music (or at least pop music) for many can't be examined as anything more than a product that exists solely to be marketable.
Like film, like language, US music genres aren't just popular products to be actively stolen from (though that happens and Black art suffers the most from it), they are ubiquitous in the collective unconscious. And while music in the English language can easily trascend barriers worldwide (though factors like racism and cultural differences affect it), listeners and radio DJs and executives within the global music industry easily turn away music in other languages due to "not understanding it" (even if they don't understand English either), or neatly categorize music in other languages as inherently foreign even if there's little difference (K-pop, Latin pop/rock), or as "world music" to steal back from if some "spice" is needed, on a similar line to how Black artists tend to be relegated to "urban" categories.
Before and after (and even during, with a Korean album that got pretty much ignored by a lot of Western critics and media, "BE") BTS' Dynamite/Butter/Permission to Dance English trilogy, they kept singing in Korean, even in collaborations with artists like Coldplay. By 2020 they had 7 years of music that contains direct tributes to the artists they were inspired by ("Hip-Hop Phile" directly names artists such as Nas, Kendrick, Biggie Smalls, among others, though that obviously doesn't automatically exempt them from critique), celebrations of their own culture ("Idol", "Ma City", "Satoori Rap"), critiques of social and often Korean-specific issues ("Baepsae", "Go Go", "Am I Wrong") and references to Western culture not just to be marketable, but to convey themes (the "Singin' in the Rain" references in "Boy With Luv" were part of their MAP OF THE SOUL series, a metacommentary on fame explicitly referencing Jung (using the concepts of Persona, Shadow and Ego); they followed "Boy With Luv" with "Black Swan", which both references Aronofsky and mirrors "Boy with Luv").
Just saying BTS is a product sold by "Korea" obscures the fact that they were from a small company, and are where they are not because South Korea pushed them, but because their fandom took an active, critical role in sharing and supporting their music, with entire blogs and pages of lyric translations and analysis. Despite fandom efforts since 2017, BTS' Korean music kept encountering barriers from the US and global music industry, with various radio DJs (note that radio has a crucial role in charting in the US) actually refusing to play their music until an English song came about.
I often think of how, while Korea got sudden widespread access to US music in the late 80s when hip-hop and R&B were already popular, here in Chile (partly due to our censorship during the very white and Christian Pinochet dictatorship against leftist art, the latter of which had significant indigenous influences) pop, rap and especially rock music are very popular, with the most famous Chilean band being the The Clash-influenced and very politically outspoken Los Prisioneros, who satirized how they'd never reach the fame and glory of English-speaking musicians in "We Are Sudamerican Rockers". While shaped by colonialism, art with heavy Western-influence has been used both here and in South Korea as a form of expression and political resistance, not just a passive attempt of marketability.
That's a factor that often feels like it's missing from this kind of conversations. Non-white artists from outside the US are expected to have this purely "ethnic" sound and are accused of being too "Westernized" for doing the art they want, even though Western art (unfortunately filtered through the white, cishet lens of the industry and the commodification of art as "American music") has shaped the cultural landscape almost everywhere by now, with different countries having their own currents of rock, pop and so on. This does not erase the issue of cultural appropriation: it coexists with it, feeds off it in a symbiosis of white, anglo hegemony.
"Given how hard it is to learn languages later in life, I likely never will." My dad learned English at 52, never say never. Also you visibly sweating as you pronounce Dakota words is a mood, as that was me last week while pronouncing Inupiaq words in my Native History class.
as a brazilian born in 1990 i´ve been reading subtitles since i was 7, watching subtitles since i can remember
As for the Native American element, our director had this to say:
"I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s a commentary on what happened in the United States, but it’s related in the sense that this family starts infiltrating the house and they already find a family living there. So you could say it’s a joke in that context. But at the same time, the Native Americans have a very complicated and long, deep history. But in this family, that story is reduced to a young boy's hobby and decoration. The boy’s mother mentions the tent as a U.S. imported good, and I think it’s like the Che Guevara T-shirts that people wear. They don’t know the life of the revolutionary figure, they just think it’s a cool T-shirt. That's what happens in our current time: The context and meaning behind these actual things only exists as a surface-level thing".
It’s always fascinating for me when I watch your videos, Kyle. In some ways, you’re a cracked mirror version of myself. Like you, I am from the DC area, lived in Europe in the early 2000s, and now reside in Queens. There’s a few key differences-I was born in 1995, so I’m a bit younger, and I lived in Germany, as opposed to the Netherlands-but there’s definitely overlap. You and I are even interested in the same topics. In this case, I’d considered posting an article about how languages change, and even get subsumed, by majority cultures, but using Norwegian, instead of Korean, as my subject. (My best friend is a writer from Oslo, who told me that 60% of all Norwegians are totally fluent in English, since they’re taught it from an early age, and that he even feels more comfortable writing in English than in Norwegian. But that’s besides the point). I don’t always agree with your arguments, but I am always happy to hear them. Keep up the good work. And if you ever need a fact-checker, let me know. :)
As someone from a small country that majorly consumes US and UK media, this video hit home. My country is currently having a sort of tourist and immigration boom, but they don't speak my language when they come over. English is more and more taking over my country's language which I know is probably inevitable and natural, but still it is also a bit sad.
Your ultimate point about ignorance is a hard one to sit with but if I can put a silver lining on that cloud: recognizing how limited our perspective is from within our own environment doesn't imbue the ability to speak someone else's story, but trying to amplify that story increases its range so those of us buried deeper have you as our entry into awareness that there is a source to seek.
I'm realizing this is just me backwards engineering the meaning of "raising awareness" but as another ignorant American I'm glad to have my awareness raised by someone sympathetic to why we're like this and grateful I have access to broader perspective through you.
fascinating!!! an insight from another corner of the world, here in lithuania we have a language commission (i imagine every country does, but ours is weirdly prominent) the purpose of which is to literally police the usage of language to preserve its purity. this leads to some real awkward filmmaking since the visual language is almost entirely hollywood-inspired, characters use american turns of phrase, but are forced into lithuanian neologisms and grammar. i imagine it has roots in how long our country has been occupied and forced to speak russian, or even deeper when we shared deeper connections with poland, but nowadays the commission also works to fight americanisms too. funny, considering we want to be like the usa in almost every other way.
Refreshing as always! So few people in their video essays are truly honest about their shortcomings in an effort to have an authoritative trustworthy voice, which is unfortunate. Your honesty on the matter makes you feel more trustworthy, and leads one to examine other sources. You 🎸 🤘 🥌 👩🎤 🗿.
This video is super good. Honestly, you could probably make another entire essay just based on the fact that in Kpop's most popular girl group, Blackpink, three of the four members are fluent in English. That's probably not a coincidence.
again an amazing video essay! I grew up bilingual German and Dutch and later learned english in school. I always knew that the american culture and language have a firm grasp on our society. I never really asked myself why that really is.
Also as a German speaker the cover version of Rammstein's "Amerika" rocks and gives a lot of meaning. Thank you for your work! 🪨 🤟
There's an essay in the collection Wired Ghosts And Robot Dreams that covers the way that use of loan words from specific sources in japanese media code for both particular character traits, themes, and indications of particular kinds of interactions. Specifically, overuse of loan words from european languages was used to code for upper class, socially sophisticated, rich, shallow, foreign, and stupid (often all at once) while loan words from chinese would code for learned but conservative. I'd be interested in seeing how the use of english loan words specifically changes its cultural valence by geographic region.
(That collection is mostly pretty good, by the way. If you want to read academics say things about anime from the 80s and 90s, it's worth reading. Only two of the essays are howlingly absurd.)
oaahh this video made me so aware of the privilege of not being a native english speaker. defining loan words in the beginning of this video felt like silly, because it's a concept im so familiar with, like it's taught at school, it's like Basic to me. i remember multiple times in school teachers talking about the worry of increased loan words from english as new products, ideology, concepts and things are coming about so fast and there is little time for the language to develop words based in finnish and other things that have had words in finnish for centuries are becoming obselete, like a lot of farming equipment. online the pressure to speak english is the worst, like no one would read this comment if i wrote it in my mother tongue. and some usamericans will still assume u are from the states if u write in english, bc they just don't even understand the global power of the us.
:) it's so nice to see monolingual perspectives that actually *contend* with the monolingual privilege of living in a cultural landscape that is primarily constructed in English, even if the presenter isn't monolingual.
I watched this Hindi drama(?) once called Shakira: The End of Evil. Something I thought was interesting was that sometimes the characters would just say full sentences in English in the middle of their dialogue.
I can't help but also think of early 2000's tokusatsu where "English is cool" was the rule. So there was just random English interspersed in the names of attacks in Super Sentai or Kamen Rider would have their various gadgets and devices voiced by English speaking actors.
I have wondered if the English thing might be a way of working around so many Indian languages (just a huge guess though).
i do not know what to do with the knowledge that you included a clip of Donald Duck casting Zetta Flare in Kingdom Hearts III in a video essay about Parasite but I love it.
Speaking of Donald Duck, you should look into how much Donald Duck have influenced Norwegian language and culture, especially through the Donald Duck comics that is the basis for most of the Ducktales cartoons. Donald Duck is practically a Norwegian folk icon despite being made in the USA
Donald duck is Finland's national bird :'D no, but kids learn to read by reading Donald duck.
I really like your perspective! I feel like a lot of your videos could only be made by an american who has also spent a lot of their formative years outside of the USA, and as a non-american that's kind of a refreshing point of view haha!
Rewatched this after watching "Past Lives", made by a Korean Woman who immigrated when she was 12, about a Korean woman who immigrated to America when she was 12, and married an American, It's very much about this cultural tension but with a unique sense. Great video
The name changing thing, man. I teach high school and have a lot of Chinese students. One of them told me she went by Annie instead of her given name because a teacher in first grade gave her a list of names and told her to pick one. Yikes.
I have been here for four minutes and I am already confused about the American way of doing subtitles. As my native language is spoken by approximately 6 million people - which means the amount of people speaking it who are living outside of the country are so few they are not even a percentage - needless to say everything is subtitled. In fact anything that is geared for an audience that is old enough to read, will have subtitles as dubbing is not a thing. For that same reason there are a host of different rules to adhere to and one of them is that you do not translate place names or concepts into a native equivalent.
English dominating other languages in its rose as the lingua franca is just something you live with when your language is basically anything not English or a language so big the country is self sustainable and even here the shift is happening. These days even French and Germans can speak English. Meanwhile my grandmother was taught English in school and most kids here know a ton of English before they even get to school where they will be taught two languages outside their mother tongue from 3rd grade (so 9-10 years old).
I had a similar experience when I got into anime in the early 00s and stumbled into the sub vs dub discourse. In Sweden, only little kids media (for ages 12 or younger) is ever dubbed, and our own film production is limited to say the least so most "cool" movies and shows are foreign media with subtitles.
For me as a teenager, watching a dub was on par with watching the teletubbies and it was insane that anyone old enough to use the internet would *admit* that they watch a dubbed show for anything other than early childhood nostalgia reasons.
@@helenanilsson5666 As a Dane, exactly this XD By the time I could read I found it embarrassing to watch the dubbed version of Disney movies.
The most brutal way to answer that confusion is to strip it down and highlight that America doesn't have strict rules about how to localize media (beyond ensuring it matches age/content restrictions), because...we don't care. We hold the cultural hegemony, if you want to play on our court, make whatever choices you think will make it most appealing to us. It's kind of an even DARKER mirror of the bell hooks quote at the end of the video: we're not just going to steal your story and change it, we're going to make YOU change it to try and appease us.
The only upside is that, in time, a lot of the more egregious examples of this kind of alteration becomes a kind of embarrassment: maybe in 20 years, people will think the alteration of "Yonsei" for Oxford is as ridiculous as changing "onigiri" to "Jelly doughnuts" in Pokemon.
@@AllWIllFall2Me well, most media creators outside of the anglophone sphere aren't interested in selling their media to the anglophone market. Music is probably the most exportable medium so pop artists prefer to sing in English for that sweet global streaming appeal, but movies and shows (and whatever the local counterpart to country music is) are usually made for the domestic market and if another country wants to buy it as well then that's just a bonus.
As always, fantastic video.
But I have something to say about learning languages part:
Started learning fourth language when I was 26. Now I'm 29 and I'm working in this language and living in the country, where this language is one of the two official languages.
Don't give up language learning because "you are too old".
P.S. Admittedly, all languages I speak or understand (so far) are from Indoeuropean family.
This is kinda insane, because I saw this video literally the day after I learnt that preschoolers in my nation have an easier time learning English than our nation language. The discussion surrounding this phenomenon is way different from what you present, as it is a sign of cultural and regional fragmentation and kids not having enough time to spend with friends and family, but also something categorically unavoidable when the world is growing more and more interconnected as we speak.
"Strangely enough, we have never been nationalistic"
I am speechless
Based video indeed🗿I'm from Brazil and it's pretty common to use some loanwords from english. Actually, the more you are an "idealist/positivist" (like motivacional coaching or smth ), more you tend to use these words. In my opinion, that's the way the colonizer narrative stands. They make you feel comfortable and more respectful by using their words and making you believe the true-neutral society, almost from "nature", is the one who speaks english.
32:50 for those wondering, Vulture wrote about this joke. The given English subtitles actually are, "Mija! Try learning English, it opens new doors!" while the actual Korean line is "Mija! Also, my name is Koo Soon-bum," which is, according to Vulture, "like a white man saying his name is 'Buford Attaway'" and is "a clever subversion of the supremacy of English." Apparently yes, this joke is mistranslated in other ways, including another English subtitle saying "Mija! How's my Korean?" (both the character and actor playing him are Korean-American.)
So, is the joke that Koo Soon-bum is a name that sounds vaguely Korean, but is actually clearly fake and ridiculous, like how Buford Attaway sounds vaguely English but is clearly fake and ridiculous? (I'm not a native speaker of English)
🪨
France prides itself on being the "exception culturelle", at least it did throughout the 90's and 2000's. This expression meant that we were THE country which didn't let American influence ''pollute'' us.
For a good chunk of it, it was empty posturing. Just closing our eyes on both other countries which had a strong nationnal culture, and on the ways Americana was actually influencing us.
this concept had some reality to it. french movies stayed numerous and popular at home even to this day (of course american films are stronger these days, but not as much as you'd think).
It also meant people would raise a tantrum at things like a disney park opening in france, while ignoring the ways our culture can squash productions of, for example, ex-colonies
also, trying to flee other cultures makes our culture poorer.
There's a lot of talk in the Netherlands about how much we're using English in our day-to-day, when existing Dutch words would do just as well, or new Dutch words would make the language flourish, but, of course, it's not like the Netherlands hasn't played this role itself in the creation of Afrikaans, which, ironically, *is* pronounced, in English, the way it is in the language itself, whereas 'Nederlands' would sound incomprehensible to most English-speakers.
I think a *lot* of languages suffer from this Anglification-creep, except for, as you touched on here, *French*, which *will* find new words instead of borrowing things from English, no matter *how* weird it ends up sounding. Anything to stop the reversal of that old colonial relationship, I suppose.
France also has an organization that controls their language which nearly nobody else fromalizes that way, but it comes with its own set of problems for French speakers who want to advance the language in their own "unofficial" ways.
I speak Spanish, most people’s i know only speak spanish yet we call this and most international movies by their English translated names. It’s complicated
It's telling when there's a popular game where players would play a simple game (usually ping pong) like normal. The only caveat is that if someone speaks a foreign word, their team's score changes to zero. Games have lasted literal hours and a lot of players default to the strategy, 'just don't talk'.
And tidal waves couldn't save the world from Californication.
On a similar subject I have been really angered recently with so many youtubers who claim "I am not even going to try to pronounce that" is to try and make people feel better. Trust me, people feel better if you try and fail than if you just write off an entire language. I work in education with a lot of foreign workers and my line manager often just ignores names he can't pronounce, whcih I find insane because you cna just google how to pronounce almost all of them! I always make sure I do it, and if I mess up I mess up, but its better than them always being known as "this 32 year old learner" or whatever.
Two youtube personalities who at least always try: Caithlyn from Ask a mortician and Max from Tasting History.
@@ateisate7270 max is great. Always does his best and usually nails it
I remember when I first watched someone call out the BS in the whole faux kindness behind "I don't want to butcher your name."
It was an American movie reviewer and she mentioned that an African actress had recently asked them: "If you are not going to even try saying my name because it is 'too difficult' and foreign to you... then why the hell do you always call Stelan Skaarsgard by his name? Is that an American name? It's funny that the whiter a foreign actor is, the more likely reviewers are to try...".
After that she always made an effort to at least try and pronounce every actor's name.
I was not expecting a Zetaflare but damn. The best moment of KH3
Also: I love what you did with the captions at 42:20. Number 45 really embodies THAT meme.
Milton "Milt" Caniff was the cartoonist who created the Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon strips. Steve Canyon was still running when I was a kid.
Thank you for making a Walter Wanger joke! I knew you wouldn't let me down. Your comedy is a precious commodity to me.
This has so much to say in such a brief format. Well done, I applaud you.
(I don't have the "rock" emoji, but know that it's there in spirit)
🤘 or 🪨?
I'm going to be honest - I'm Australian. The part about colonialism within your own country and the relationship of language between conqueror and conquered is haunting to me.
I'm part Aboriginal (or Indigenous, whatever you want to call it) and when I met someone from my tribe - a 2nd cousin - she informed me that our tribe's language no longer exists. Its far from the only example out there but it feels perverse. I mean for the obvious reason of "I am speaking the language of people who tried to genocide my ancestors" (My mother is "Stolen Generation" because she is white passing) but also Aboriginal stories are passed down orally. I have to ask what's lost in the translation from the original language to English?
Language sometimes doesn't need a thousand years to change. Sometimes all it needs is a single generation.
I had a class on Korean culture, and there was an article that talked about American influence on the former, and that in turn, is now similarly affecting SE Asian countries like Thailand for example
Kind of true, Thailand has got a lot of cultural influence from Korea. KPop got really big in Thailand long before it was popular in the west, which is how Thai people like Lisa would end up in that industry. Of course, other cultures have been influential, especially Japan where things like anime was extremely huge and American culture prior to that
C'mon, dude, don't eat spicy food if it makes you sweat! :D
On a different note to my other comment, there's actually a 1977 essay by Marxist Venezuelan writer Ludovico Silva called "Comics and Their Ideology", where he criticizes US comics like The Phantom, Mandrake the Magician and yes, Donald Duck comics from an anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist perspective haha
God I love new BHH videos, best thing to see uploaded
The duolingo sound effects gave me anxiety right away lol
I have no idea how to do a rock emoji in UA-cam so I'll just type ROCK and hope that suffices.
This was a really good video, and it got me thinking about a lot of things...like, say for example this comment. That I am writing in English. On UA-cam - an American website, under a video by an American talking about American words in a Korea movie. And this is an odd experience, is it not, for me. Because I am not American. I am in fact not from any nation that has English as a primary or even secondary language. I'm Bulgarian, and yet here we are. Watching a video in a foreign language about languages foreign to the foreign language speaker's culture.
It's all fucking weird, isn't it. Anyway, half-baked introspection aside, good job Kyle, I am glad you are still making videos. I really am. Keep it up!
🪨 I don't see why any of this is much of a problem beyond the somber tone it's conveyed. Language contains the record of conquered and conqueror, and war has been an eternal fact of human existence since forever; the contextualization and mutability of language throughout cultures becomes another facet of humanity. I'm unsure what to make of the conclusion 'isn't it interesting how conquest shapes culture, including language?' Yeah. It's interesting to know and recognize, I guess?
The part about Jane Fonda using the English name of the movie rather than the Korean name reminded me of something I noticed when I lived in South Korea. They rarely translated the names of English movies, they only transliterated them into Korean characters, so Koreans could read the titles, but unless they spoke English well, they might not know what the title meant. It made me wonder if we did the same in the US, if I would even be able to remember the titles of films like Chinjeolhan Geumja-ssi, even when romanized.
Also, to bring in Pulp Fiction and another form of American culture with global reach, a Quarter Pounder was a called a Quarter Pounder in Korea, despite the words being rather clumsy to say in Korean and Koreans not using pounds as a unit of measure.
35:14 I mean... we do this with other languages too. You mentioned William the Conqueror when it's actually Guillaume, with European names we translate them, with native names we would often say them literally, a practice that is fading as we hear more native voices, which I think is a good thing, literal names kind of sound silly... the point being, it's not an ominous or terrible thing that we call William the Conqueror William instead of Guillaume. Nor is it a bad thing when the Japanese call William, Wiriamu.
The point I'm making here is accentuated to it's maximum extent with your montage at 40:30. The point being that if Korean adopted more English words.... it will sound the way English sounds today with its many French loanwords... and there won't be any problem with that. Why does it matter how many English loanwords are in Korean especially since (if it's anything like Japanese) these English loanwords are adopted by youth voluntarily with no prodding from the actual United States. Same thing happens in French Canada, more and more English loanwords are entering French Canada and this is due to the ongoing conquest of French Canada from English Canada, an ongoing phenomenon, and the people who cry out against that, instituting language policies that defend the native culture of French Canada are the types of people that you would malign as being reactionary racists.
This leads to another question... you critique the United States' role in the Americanisation of Cinema, but then... what is ''authentic'' Korean cinema to begin with? I mean is anything other than the most stereotypical asian drone with ancient medieval instruments just ''americinized'' korean music? Does ''authentic'' korean music not exist? What would that constitute?
"no prodding from the actual United States"? Seriously? Hollywood gets massive state sponsorship in many forms, including hefty tax benefits as well as access to military hardware and personnel, specifically because it allows the US to dominate foreign entertainment markets. And I do not use 'dominate' lightly here: Finnkino, the company that has an effective monopoly on movie theaters and distribution here in Finland, is owned by AMC. Finnkino has refused to show Finnish movies in favor of American ones.
Sure, loanwords and cultural influence will occur, and that's basically a good thing. But what US cultural hegemony does is limit our exposure to any other cultures, thereby forcing us to adopt their loanwords and their influence.
That is the logical result of subjecting media to capitalism - markets tend toward monopolies.
@@MuadMouse are those finnish movies shown in finnish or are they subtitled?
@@jhonjacson798 Here I mean Finnish-made movies. All foreign language film and tv is subtitled here, except of course stuff aimed at kids.
@@MuadMouse alright. Well for one, not sure if the situation is the same in Korea, Korea has tons of Korean made pop culture... So I imagine that it wouldn't be difficult to only consume Korean made stuff if you really wanted to (easier than Finnish stuff in Finland I would imagine). Could be wrong on that though I will admit.
And second, even in the case of Finland the adoption of loanwords by the populace would be voluntary. It's not like native american cultural genocide where you dissensentivise the speaking of the native tongue and get punished. Watching tons of foreign films doesn't force you to adopt loanwords, otherwise every weeb would start adopting Japanese words into their English vocabulary.
(this became an essay/rant barely connected to the video oh god i am so sorry) oh this is an excellent video, the way that languages take, learn, borrow, and colonise eachother is so interesting, im currently trying to learn welsh and it's so interesting to see which words are mutually understandible, and then wonder if that's due to proximity to anglo-saxon linguistic development over the centuries, or enforced by the ruling/colonsing class.
That bell hooks quote is really interesting. I'm Australian, as an Australian we share the same language as America (mostly, we're both austensible anglophone contries after all) but the language of images, of symbolism, of the land itself is so fundimentally different between us and yet here we just kind of accept it and embrase the american gaze. we have to if we want entertainment; we watch wintery chistmas movies when most of us are trying not to get heat stroke on christmas day, we hear Katy Perry songs about the 4th of July when we have never declared any independace from the crown, we just kind of deal with these learn Americanisms. where as, until recently and only barely, America only accepts out own visions of the country through the lense of dystopia, exploitation or purposeful marketing (see: Mad Max and Crocodile Dundee), and this specific lense has been sold back to us over and over again in the Junkrat's, Crash Bandicoot's and Chuck Hanson from Pacific Rim's of the American world.
One of the the Australian Game Dev/writer behind the game 'Necrobarista' wrote a medium article a few years back about something they labled the 'Uncanny Valley of Culture', in that Americans will see something made by and australian and while we accept it as normal, they american viewer will see something in english and will read it in a completly unintended way, for example the game Necrobarista opens with a title card that reads 'the terminal, Carlton Victoria, Australia 3053', and at least one player of the game read that number as a year. It's a post code. Almost all music, film and other art from this country that wants to be big in american has to make the choice of being australian or being palatble to an american audiance even the origional mad max had mel gibson re-dub himself with an american accent, I notice it when someone sings in an Australian accent. though this is slowly changing with things like the heartbreak high reboot which is so unapolgetically Australian.
As a white anglo australian I also realise that i have privalage of in this discussion, as a part of the countries dominant voice whilst people in other groups are barely even heard here. If america barely get's white anglo Australia right what hope does it have for everyone else who lives here? It is astounding to me that the first Asian australia actor using their australian accent in american media has been from ARCANE of all things, to say nothing of how american superhero films have characters who are Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander's portrayed by black europeans (the Wizard in SHAZAM being the big one imo, given that he's a Dreaming spirit in the comics the film was drawing from, Bishop in Days of Future falls into this), because the white hollywood gaze only sees the phenotypical similaries between groups and thus casts them from the same pool of actors.
obviously the cultural imperialsim of Australia by American is fundimentally different the that which happens in Korea. Australia is a colonialsit nation, Sovereignty has never been ceded, It always was and always will be, Aboriginal land. the fact remains that there are parallels between these situations. it is telling about how much America pushes even into countries and 'cultures' that white supremacy deems similar.
also off topic from the rest of the comment; it's very interesting to me that 'Naur' phonetic transcription of australians saying 'no' (tho i cannot hear the 'aur' sound for the life of me, but i think my own name sounds fundimentally different coming from an american voice so whatever lol) rose to such prominace on twitter dot hell because of K-Pop fandom talking about the accent of australian born k-pop idols🪨🪨
You know, I actually figured out the battle you were talking about at 34:00.
Proper words in a tongue you're not used to is always hard. (Korean is actually considered one of the harder languages to learn, next to Russian. English....isn't hard, it just generally doesn't make any sense). I studied Japanese in high school and college, and I tend to cook with ingredients more common in the Pacific Rim. Which means I can rattle off ingredients from non-English languages pretty well, but...my mom can't. She struggles with words like "kabocha" or "chijimisai". Both of which have perfectly useful English terms (it's just pumpkin and spinach).
But that's just cooking. That's not actual names. Recently at work, two employees had names that were....not common for white people. They also used names that were easier to pronounce for people, and I know at least one of the two actually picked the second name for a specific reason. So then which is better? Struggling through someone's given name? Mispronouncing a given name or using a name that, even if it's not their given name, they're at least happy with? Is any of that even relevant compared to the frustration of having someone mispronounce your name every day?
I don't know, language is hard, this video is good.
Been watching your vids since The Pig Fucking Movie and they have only been getting better.
This might be one of my favorite videos you’ve done. Just the fact that so many other cultures expect children to learn English very young and make sure they get good at it as they grow up, but we don’t teach American children learn other languages until high school and college, because getting good at other languages aren’t treated as a priority in American school systems.
This is an amazing piece of art. I loved everything about it, and not only thought me something, but made me intrigued to learn more. Thank you so much for your amazing work! 🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽
As someone who is born in Hong Kong I'm extremely familiar with how Hong Kongers just casually codeswitch into English quite often during conversations. But its mostly done by Gen X-ers and millennials.
Fantastic video, Kyle! I really appreciated you pointing out the indigenous appropriating the family casually partakes in and the language they use (like tent instead of teepee)
The Recommending Holiness comment you to engage with this video.
One of my favorite videos of yours in a while, excellent
Great work as always Kyle 🪨
I might have misheard since I don’t speak Korean, but if I heard correctly the term the mother (I guess, haven’t gotten round to see the movie yet sadly) used for fanboy was “otaku”, which in case was borrowed from Japanese. Just found it interesting considering the theme of the essay.
Also, great work as usual. You are my favourite 🪨🤘
first time it was otaku, then it was "mania"
Great video once again, I continue to be amazed by the amout of effort you put into your work.
The acoustics in your sauna are impressive Kyle.
Fantastic video as always, count me as a subscriber now. The part where you compared words originating from Old English to words originating from the aristocratic French blew this English major's mind. 🎸 (that's the rock you mean, right?)
21:07 In case you weren't being facetious, Milton Caniff was a cartoonist who created the hugely popular newspaper comic strip Terry and the Pirates. That strip, and other action and adventure comic strips of the 1930s, were so popular that they led directly to the creation of the comic book. It seems weird now for Wanger to include him in that list, but back then comic strips and comic books were big business.
Terry and the Pirates is also pretty difficult to read these days, as the titular pirates were Chinese, and were horrible Asian stereotypes. Their leader was literally named Dragon Lady, and I'm fairly certain the trope of the same name was named after her. Terry and the heroes of the strip travel around with a Chinese man named Connie (which is short for his chosen English name George Webster Confucius), who I can only describe as something from one of those World War II anti-Japan propaganda posters. It's pretty bad, but was probably the most popular comic strip of its time, and it ran for around 40 years (though Caniff left the strip in 1946 to create another one, Steve Canyon).
This video rocked! 🪨
One of your best. Thank you for sharing this fantastic video with us
(edit: [rock emoji])
I'm not quite through the video yet, but Kyle mentioned how French loan words in English are considered fancier than the Old English words. I just want to note that English loan words in other languages are unlikely to have the same status as French loan words because the *context* of the borrowed linguistics matter.
In Sweden we also imported a lot of French words and they are fancy - because they were brought in and used by aristocracy. However, we also have a substantial amount of *Germanic* loan words because in the 1450s one third of the middle class people in Stockholm were from what is now Germany. We were actively encouraging German craftsmen to immigrate (because we really needed the craftsmen) and Swedish cities were effectively Swedish-German bilingual. That said, our German loan-words do not have the same status as the French loan-words. The German loan-words are terminology related to middle class craftsmen. Our French loan-words are terminology related to the fancies of nobility.
Today most of our new loan-words are from English, and it's hard to pin down in the moment what "class" these loan-words will have as a group while we are still actively importing more and more words. While I'm not familiar with Korean, I suspect they too will continue importing more English loan-words in the foreseeable future. But subjectively I don't feel like English loan-words have the high-status flair of French loan-words.
One thing I can say though, is that *Americans don't need to feel white guilt over English loan-words abroad.* Whatever our reason for adopting this or that foreign word, it was our choice to adopt that word. We could have chosen to translate the words to a correct native counterpart (some languages are very insistent on that practise) but every loan-word is incorporated in a language for a reason, consciously or subconsciously. We are doing this to our own languages, it's not your fault.
Oh yeah, something I've noticed with when speaking swedish, is how often we switch to english to emphasize certain words or phrases. There was a small period where I would cringe over the overuse of english in kpop and latin pop, before realizing that it has happened all the time in swedish hiphop for over 20 years. 'The botten is nådd' is pure swenglish
This is always such a fascinating topic. As someone who's first language is German (slightly ironic, given the ending credits) and only speaks one other language well (can you guess which? xD) but has attempted to learn several other languages, it's really disheartening how difficult language acquisition is and how it does create such a barrier to the rest of the world, this little rock 🪨floating in space we live on.
Still, there's a certain degree of realism to be had. The limit of human linguistic faculties mean that approximations, be they translations or mangled pronounciation attempts, are what will have to make due at times when we learn about or interact with other people and their cultural artifacts... Unless we manage to create a universal translator that can move our tongues for us in order to ensure that we both UNDERSTAND and PRONOUNCE correctly.
Good that you have a sponsor, Hello Fresh is a great sponsor.
I've always thought there are few people in this world as concerned and as ashamed of American cultural imperialism as the American themselves. I wonder if someone someday should have a look at the idea that a simple "we're teaching you our language" à la Caliban's quote, at the end of your video, is an oversimplifciation that denies whatever agency is left to non-English speakers in their own choices of what languages to learn. It is true that there is a pressure towards English -- anything successful will create the pressure for imitation, including linguistic imitation (consider American anime fans using Japanese words like "kawaii" or "tsundere"), and there's a lot to be said about the unfairness of this fact. It is equally true that being able to imitate the successful elements around ourselves is precisely the way in which success spreads to places other than the so-called "imperialistic centers" -- which means that someday Korea, Japan, or China might well overtake Hollywood and become more culturally important than Hollywood ever was, and that part of the reason why this "breaking free" was possible would be ... the conscious imitation and borrowing of 'what works'.
It's so easy to forget that those who imitate also have agency, even when they imitate. Korean K-pop groups going "yeah baby!" are not just recording devices faithfully reproducing noise from their memories. They are actual people making choices, often in arguably unfair circumstances, but choices nonetheless. I wished we'd give more attention to this fact when considering how cultural influence happens. (Do you know how much borrowing, imitation, and 'cultural colonization' there was between North American Amerindian groups, for instance -- and how many conflicts underlie it? How many situations that might strike us as 'unfair'? Yet it is so difficult for us to look at a Lakhota word and not think that it represents something pure and pristine... when it might as well be a cultural borrowing from Mohawk, Comanche, or Blackfoot... and how we should react to it in case it turns out to be true?...)
🪨Interesting video. You linereading Bell Hooks did fit with the subject of the quote, but it was definitely one of those 'wait a minute...' moments.
I’m currently teaching in an environment where almost half of the students in the entire school (three grades) is an English Language Learner, at various levels. I’ve always understood that English is one of the hardest languages to learn because there are so many spelling/grammar rules that don’t make any sense. This video, however, reminded me how insidious American English can be in languages around the world.
Kyle, as always, you’ve given me a wealth of food for thought. Thank you ❤.
I kind of expected a clip of cloud atlas with the bit "what will korean sound like in a thousand year" (Which has ironically a bit of a meta-reading)
Huh, my emojis don't seem to work, so, :rock:
EDIT: Okay, so it felt really wrong to just leave my comment at that on a 9-month-old masterpiece of a video, so I want to add that, as much as I still love seeing videos that keep pointing out all the various kinds of symbols, cinematic language, character subtleties, and etc. of Parasite, this is the first video that felt truly unique. It covers an aspect of the film and our culture that is literally staring us in the face for English-speakers, yet no one really voices (pun unintended). This video sparked more conversation amongst my family than any other about Parasite and also helped us finally answer a long-standing dinner-table question: why does America hold the pop-culture monopoly? Guess we super underestimated WWII. It made me re-examine the languages I speak, especially as a French-English speaker who wondered why there were so many French loanwords in English. So, thank you as always Kyle for your incredible research and insight, and for giving me hours and hours of food for thought :)