Interest in anime, gaming and K-pop is fuelling a boom in Korean and Japanese university degrees that is helping to revive modern languages departments struggling with falling enrolments.

Acceptances to study Korean more than trebled from 50 to 175 between 2012 and 2018, while Japanese places grew by 71% in the same period, according to a report published this year by the University Council of Modern Languages (UCML). More students now study Korean than Russian, and more take Japanese than Italian, the report shows.

Experts who spoke to the Guardian said this was due to the popularity of east Asian culture – in particular K-pop and J-pop, Japanese video games, anime and popular films such as Parasite, and series such as the violent survival drama Squid Game – which has been boosted by their accessibility on platforms such as Netflix and Spotify.

According to Netflix data, the South Korean series Squid Game is comfortably its most viewed show of all time, with 1.65bn hours of the series streamed in the first four weeks after its release date.

The rising popularity of Korean culture in particular, a phenomenon referred to as the Korean wave or K-wave, or hallyu, is influencing trends in a number of sectors, from cosmetics and fashion to food and household appliances.

At the heart of the K-wave is K-pop, which in 2017 was already estimated to be a nearly $5bn industry. The South Korean K-pop group BTS set a new record and made headlines for achieving the most YouTube views for a music video debut – more than 101.1bn within 24 hours for their 2020 song Dynamite.

Emma Cayley, the UCML chief executive, said: “It is clear that there has been a shift away from more traditionally taught European languages to non-European.”

She said this included Arabic and Chinese, which combined with Japanese and Korean are driving the recovery of the study of languages and culture in universities.

A recent UCML study based on universities self-reporting their language provision suggested the proportion of universities offering Japanese rose from 19% in 2018 to 39% in 2020-21, while a small increase was observed in departments offering Korean.

 

This article was first published on The Guardian website on 29th December and you can read the article in full here.