1950s – today · A dynamic tomorrow
For a long time Korean culture was mostly something Koreans shared with each other. Then, in the 1990s, it began to travel.
The word for this is Hallyu, the Korean wave. It joins han, meaning Korean, and ryu, meaning flow or wave. Two things helped it start: the end of military censorship over the entertainment industry, and the recovery from the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Chinese journalists began using the term in 1999.
In 2003 and 2004 the romance drama Winter Sonata became a huge hit, especially in Japan, and boosted tourism to Korea. In 2012 Psy's Gangnam Style became the first YouTube video to reach one billion views. BTS and Blackpink then found audiences around the world.
In 2020 the film Parasite won Best Picture at the Academy Awards, the first non-English-language film to do so. In 2021 Netflix released Squid Game, and the Oxford English Dictionary added both hallyu and Korean wave.
This is why so many people begin learning Korean today: they hear a song or watch a drama and want to understand it without subtitles.
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