Document Type
Article
Abstract
This article examines representations of the Modern English Speaker of Korean (MESK) in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), as lexicographers listened to and documented the language of this figure over the past century. I show that, until the early twenty-first century, the most salient type of MESK was the Koreanist, a white, masculine expert on and translator of Korean, the language of a racial other. By contrast, more recent Korean entries, influenced by the global spread of hallyu, have invoked the Korea Fan, a figure that potentially unsettles longstanding ideologies of language, race, and gender. I argue, however, that the dictionary’s techniques of linguistic regimentation continue to represent the MESK, even when expressing Korean fandom, as fundamentally aligned with the Koreanist.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Publication Info
Published in Signs and Society, 2026, pages 1-21.
Rights
© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Semiosis Research Center at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original article is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press or the rights holder(s) must be obtained prior to any commercial use.
APA Citation
Chun, E. W. (2026). Korean Words in the OED : Race, Gender, and the Modern English Speaker. Signs and Society, 1–21.https://doi.org/10.1017/sas.2025.10042