Turkey’s K-pop craze sparks fear of cultural invasion
A student of mine at MIIS shared this news with me and I am sharing it with you. I didn’t know K-Pop was this big in Turkey to be honest. I also looked into the journal as this is the first time I hear about it. Based on the brief research I have done, it looks like it belongs to the conservative group who, according to the Turkish government, organized the failed coup in 2016.

Deniz, many of my middle and high school female students in Turkey LOVED BTS (all male group) as well as a few other top K-pop bands. It is rare for a K-pop band to be mixed gender by design. This love of the musical genre was reflected in an interest in the Korean language as well although there were no Korean language courses in Trabzon at the time I was there. The students were just listening to the music to learn a few words/phrases and watching YouTube tutorials but many of the top bands do sing in English and I would be asked to explain some of the lyrics, unfortunately.
Wow – I had no idea! I remember meeting a couple of high school graduates who self-taught themselves Korean and I was pretty impressed – simply not understanding where the interest came from. Maybe it was K-Pop? Now I am more curious…