1. INTRODUCTION In recent years, Korean pop music has become a major force in the music industry, gaining a considerable fandom in the process. Based mainly on the internet, the K-pop fandom has become a complex network of fans on various social media sites ravenously consuming and discussing the genre in question. As the fandom has grown and changed, different archetypes of fans have been identified and commented upon. One such archetype of fan is the “Koreaboo”. Viewed wholly negatively, the archetype of the “Koreaboo” is one that is seen as being obsessed with and appropriative of Korean culture and the Korean language by other fans. In particular, the linguistic habits of fans viewed as Koreaboos have come under fire. This Koreaboo register is characterized by using Korean words in otherwise non-Korean writing. In this paper I argue that other fans have created what I am calling “Mock Koreaboo” in order to express their negative view of Koreaboo fans and their linguistic habits. Following in the tradition of Mock Spanish (Hill 1995; Hill 1998), I show that Mock Koreaboo is a form of mock language being used by K-pop fans to mock other K-pop fans. Like Mock Spanish, fans use this Mock Koreaboo to disparage Koreaboo fans through an exaggerated version of Koreaboo speech. While Mock Koreaboo uses Korean linguistic resources to do this, it does not ultimately aim to mock Korean people, unlike mock Spanish. Instead, Mock Koreaboo seeks to criticize the appropriation of Korean by those viewed as Koreaboos and the ideology associated with this archetype. In addition, I argue that Mock Koreaboo uses stancetaking to show superiority over fans seen as Koreaboos. Mock Koreaboo utilizes elitist stances (Jaworski & Thurlow 2009) to negatively evaluate the figure of the Koreaboo and elevate the user. Through its mocking nature, fans can use Mock Koreaboo to show how they reject the ideologies of the Koreaboo and are a better fan as a result. I will also discuss how Koreaboo speech and Mock Koreaboo create several orders of indexicality (Silverstein 2003). With Korean as the nth order, Koreaboo speech and Mock Koreaboo constitute n+1st and n+2nd orders of indexicality respectively, creatively building off each other. In this paper, I will discuss the archetype of the koreaboo fan and how K-pop fans react to koreaboos through the use of a Mock Koreaboo register. I will discuss the use of this register, the attitudes Mock Koreaboo represent, as well as how it utilizes stance and indexicality. 2. BACKGROUND: K-POP, FANS, AND GLOBAL FLOWS K-pop is, at its core, simply pop music that comes from South Korea. The history of modern K-pop reaches back to the 1990s, and throughout this history the genre has always been heavily influenced by music by Black Americans (Mosely & McMahon 2020). While K-pop has always been global, in the past ten years K-pop has become increasingly globalized in its reach via fan efforts and increased marketing outside of Asia (Chang & Park 2018; Herman 2019). This has resulted in fan communities springing up all over the world, participating in mainly online contexts (Swan 2018). The online experience of being K-pop fan is significant to understanding K-pop fandom in general. One study of K-pop “stan” Twitter has categorized it as a community of practice (Malik & Haidar 2020). Malik and Haidar interview and analyze interactions between a multi- national group of fans of the K-pop group Monsta X. Through their research, they show that these fans have formed strong bonds with each other over their shared interests despite their distance and linguistic differences. Chang & Park view the online experience of BTS fans as a modern “tribe” despite physical and cultural distance between the fans themselves (2018). While such research shows the structure of K-pop fans online, there is little research into the ideology of K-pop fandom and its linguistic behaviors as a whole. Research on individual fans such as those who post reaction videos on YouTube exists, looking into topics such as polyculturalism in fans’ blending of Korean pop culture with Black culture (Oh 2017). Another study based on interviews with Canadian K-pop fans found that these fans experience K-pop as a hybrid cultural product that allows them to participate in globalization (Yoon 2018). The phenomenon of K-pop’s international reach and fanbase owes itself to the now global travelling of information. Linguistic, visual and cultural information now “flow” around the world, finding their ways into different places and along with their meanings and uses. Scholars like H. Samy Alim have researched these global flows of culture. Alim (2009) specifically has looked extensively into how hip-hop culture has spread around the world, becoming a new site for identification and meaning making. One specific case of this in linguistics literature is the Korean pop star CL, who, in one of her music videos, has adopted signifiers of hip-hop and chola culture to represent her being a “bad girl” (Garza 2021). Embodying the nappeun gijibae character through the visual language and linguistic resources of chola, blackness, and hip-hop, CL can come across as a “bad bitch” but also reinforces negative stereotypes about these groups. In linguistics, another noted case of Korean media utilizing cultural flows is the case of the portrayal of Korean-American. In the 1990s, the style of the Korean-American, especially those from Los Angeles became in vogue. The visual language of K-pop stars from the US, heavily influenced by hip-hop itself, the English language, and the representation of LA came to represent coolness (Lo & Chi Kim 2012). The figure of the Korean-American was seen as a skilled-multilingual, especially compared to Koreans who viewed themselves as bad at English. Eventually Korean-Americans lost their status, replaced by the “transnational Korean returnee” figure. 2.1. STANCETAKING AND INDEXICALITY In Du Bois seminal work on stance, he defines stance as a “public act by a social actor, achieved dialogically through overt communicative means, of simultaneously evaluating objects, positioning subjects (self and others), and aligning with other subjects, with respect to any salient dimension of the sociocultural field” (2007: 163). In Ochs’ view, stance is an act that can index further meanings. Through her writing on the indexicality of gender, Ochs’ positions stance as an intermediatory step for language to index social meanings such as gender (1992: 342). People use language to create stances through direct indexicality, and then these stances indirectly index social meanings. Many types of stances exist including epistemic and deontic stances, but this paper will focus on elitist stances. Jaworski and Thurlow’s work on this topic sees elitism as a person “making a claim to exclusivity, superiority, and/or distinctiveness” that needs constant upkeep (2009: 196). Through their study of travelogues in British newspapers, Jaworski and Thurlow show that while elitist stances are still an evaluation of a subject, they do so by making this claim to superiority. Elitist stances are enacting certain ideologies wherein the object that the subject is evaluating is better than others, and therefore the subject is also better than other subjects. In Ochs’ view, this would be an example of indirect indexicality where one indexes their own superiority through making these stances of elitism about other subjects. The identity of elitism is itself evaluative and is upkept through the evaluative power of stancetaking. As I will show later, K-pop fans exhibit their superiority to the fans they consider to be Koreaboos through the use of elitist stancetaking in Mock Koreaboo. Indexicality is a wide-reaching concept in sociocultural linguistics, and a very important one. In a simplified way, indexicality is the way social meanings are constituted through language (Ochs 1992). These meanings can be anything from identities to activities or positions on something. One of the most influential writings on indexicality is Michael Silverstein’s work on indexical order (2003). In this article, Silverstein presents the concept indexical order, a system where indexical meanings can be created on top of each other incorporating the previous meaning but innovating on it at the same time. The first indexical meaning is called the nth order of indexicality and any meaning that follows is therefore n+1st order of indexicality. In this example, the nth order is the “standard” pronunciation of New York English. Lower middle-class people were shown to hypercorrect their speech, in this case having higher rates of /th/ and final /r/ than even upper middle-class people. This hypercorrection of pronunciation constitutes a n+1st order, according to Silverstein. In comparison to Ochs’ view on indexicality, Silverstein’s indexical order also shows how indexical meanings are layered. While Ochs describes direct and indirect indexicality as a way that meaning can be constructed through different resources, indexical order shows how indexical meanings can be utilized and innovated upon to create even more new meanings. Blommaert (2007) innovates on this concept by conceptualizing indexicality as polycentric. In this view, indexicality revolves around “centres” comprised of “complexes of norms and perceived appropriateness criteria, in effect the larger social and cultural body of authority” (p. 118). “Centres” can be anything of any size, from a singular person to a global concept. Conversations and interactions can and often are polycentric, moving between centres of indexicality. Blommaert gives the example of a Rasta DJ in South Africa changing his speaking patterns based on how he wants to be perceived and what the topic is. Koreaboos and other kinds of K-pop fans can be seen as orienting towards a Korean centre of indexicality, particularly through the way that Koreaboos utilize Korean linguistic resources as is shown later in this article. Mock Koreaboo, in contrast, is then orienting towards a non-Korean centre through criticizing Koreaboo’s linguistic behaviors. As I will show in this article, Mock Koreaboo utilizes elitist stances to create a separate indexical order from Koreaboo speech, and to index their disapproval of the figure of the Koreaboo. 3. METHODS This paper is based in an online ethnography of K-pop fans. Digital etthnography, also called virtual ethonography or cyber-ethnography, is simply ethnography that is done in virtual spaces. The methods of digital ethnography can be as wide and varied as traditional, in-person ethnography. Beneito-Montagut (2011) argues that digital ethnography is not different than traditional ethography, it just requires different “research decisions regarding the particular field and location of research” (p. 719). In this paper, Beneito-Montagut describes a method that follows a user throughout their online life and activities, just as a researcher might follow a person to their job and hobbies. Hallet and Barber (2014) advocate for incorporating someone’s online life into the rest of those experiences, as those cannot be meaningfully separated anymore. Bonilla and Rosa (2015) put forth the idea of hashtag ethnography, wherein a hashtag on social media can itself become a site of research, linking various ideas and posts on a certain topic together in one place. Like Beneito-Montagut (2011), Bonilla and Rosa also argue for the following of specific users to get the context of their posts. In this project , I have gathered data in two main ways: searching and browsing. For searching, I looked through mainly K-pop specific subreddits (r/kpoprants, r/kpopthoughts, etc.) and Twitter. I searched for specific terms related to this project such as “oppar”, “unnir”, “Koreaboo” and other terms, specifically Korean words which are associated with Koreaboo speech. In regards to browsing, I collected any relevant posts which I found while browsing these spaces on my own time, which I often do. Collected posts were stored in a spreadsheet along with the time of posting, theme of post, and the platform it was found on. 4. DATA AND ANALYSIS: WHAT IS A KOREABOO? The origin of the term “koreaboo” is an amalgamation of the term “weeaboo” and “Korea”. “Weeaboo” itself is a term decribing people not of Japanese descent who are so into Japanese media and culture athat they denounce their own in favor of Japanese culture, or those who wish they are Japanese but not (Ewens 2017; Hidayat & Hidayat 2020). The word itself is a nonsense word, coming from a the comic “The Perry Bible Fellowship”, in which a person is attacked for merely mentioning the word “weeaboo” (Birney & Keogh). The term is pejorative, and people rarely self-identify with “weeaboo”. Koreaboo is along the same lines. In one Reddit post on the subreddit r/kpoprants, a poster defines a koreaboo as “someone who is obsessed with Korean culture so much they denounce their own culture and call themselves Korean” (Engenie 2021). A commenter on this post replies that this is too strong of a definition, saying that it is someone who becomes obsessed with Korea, but does not interact with the wider culture of Korea other than K-pop or K-dramas. Like “weeaboo”, Koreaboo is also only applied to people who are not of Korean descent. Apart from this post, the Koreaboo is mainly defined through actions, particularly through the use of the Korean language in otherwise non-Korean contexts, especially by non- Korean speakers. Another Reddit post on the same forum asks the question, “is my friend a Koreaboo?” SORRY FOR ANY KOREAN WORDS SPELT WRONG. I really need to know cause I don’t know how to tell her. Her daily vocabulary is mixed with broken Korean all the time, when I call her she answers her phone with a “yeoboseyo”. But here’s where it’s starts getting cringe for me she calls her mom “eomma” and speaks to her whole family in Korean... like if her siblings asks her questions or just conversing in general she’d be like “ani” “ne” “jinjja” “aish” “wae” “omo” “aigoo” and “hajima”she says aigoo all the time. I asked her one time do they know what she’s saying and she told me they’re starting to catch on mind you we are African American. she throws in little phrases of Korean here and there and calls her husband oppa and he’s not even Korean he’s Puerto Rican. One time she asked him to help her with this video game she was stuck on and she started to do aegyo to get him to help her and she did it in this whiny voice cringe alert oppaaaa~~ jinjja pouts help me with this game and proceeded to laugh and tell me she does aegyo when she doesn’t get her way. She also talks to her regular friends in Korean too they don’t know a thing about kpop or Korea at all.... she talks them and they’re always like what did you say or what does that mean and it gives me second hand embarrassment soooo bad. Last thing we both went to see BTS in Chicago at soldier field what coincidence our Lyft driver was a older Korean man and the whole way she kept talking in broken Korean and I’m in the back like because we’re actually in close proximity of someone who actually speaks Korean. I love her so much but I don’t want to hurt her feelings so I’m just gonna post it on here. What do y’all think? FIGURE 1: Reddit post by StanBTS_ (StanBTS_ 2021) The poster describes the behavior mainly as using Korean words such as “yeoboseyo” [hello] to answer the phone instead of the English “Hello” and talking to her family in Korean despite them being African Americans living in Chicago, according to the poster. The comments on this post universally categorize this person as a Koreaboo. One commenter recommends that the friend learn Korean formally, suggesting that the bad attempts of using Korean are the problem here. Another commenter worries that they are a Koreaboo since they tend to use Korean but are studying the language. Another user replies that “it’s normal since it comes from you actually intently learning the language but Koreaboos just want to say annyeong yeorobeun [hello everyone] because it sounds cool.” This again suggests that improperly using Korean without the proper intent is the issue with Koreaboos. An article on what signs to look out for in a Koreaboo also focuses on language (Napper 2019). Interestingly, this article includes using Korean romanization but not the Korean writing system, known as hangul. This also adds to the inauthenticity in language dimension, where using hangul is seen as appropriate, but using romanization is unacceptable. According to posts like this and my own experience, some ideologies associated with koreaboo speech are: Description: Example: Gendered terms of address Oppa, unnie, hyung, noona “I love you” in Korean, especially the word “love” without the verb ending Saranghae [I love you], saranghaeyo [I love you], I sarang [love] you Using romanization instead of hangul Saranghae [I love you] instead of 사랑해 Korean Intensifiers Jinjja [very], neomu [very] Exclamations Omo, aigoo, aish Other basic vocabulary Ani/aniyo [no], ne [yes], wae [why] Using Korean words in an otherwise English utterance I neomu [very] like this TABLE 1: Features associated with Koreaboo speech The chief characteristic associated with Koreaboo speech is the use of Korean words and other linguistic resources outside the context of a Korean utterance. One major aspect of the above examples is the mention of the word “oppa”. The Korean word “oppa”, written 오빠 in hangul, is a gendered term of address used by women to address a slightly older man that one is close to, like a friend or partner (Jeong & Yu 2021). In South Korea, female fans often use “oppa” to address the K-pop boy groups they are a fan of, likely drawing on the romantic partner aspect of the term (tracy wonwoo 2022). Non-Korean fans have picked up on this, and some non- Korean fans have begun to use the term as well, in much the same way. In the Figure 1, the friend is said to use the term with her husband, who is also not Korean. The article makes reference to the use of this and the similar term “unnie” (written 언니 in Korean) used by women to address slightly older women, calling it “pure K-Boo culture.” Searching Twitter, I am able to find many instances of Korean used in an otherwise non- Korean context, as is considered Koreaboo speech. Consider the following excerpt of a tweet: “jinjja me는 freaking out” (ella 2022). In this tweet, the user uses both a Korean intensifier written using romanization jinjja [really] and the Korean topic particle 는 written in hangul attached to the English me. The rest of the tweet is in English, with the only other Korean terms being the names of people and a Korean television program. The use here seems to mainly be for aesthetic purposes, or to index the user’s like of Korean culture. According to this user’s personal website linked in their Twitter profile, she is from the Philippines and only speaks basic Korean, showing that this is not a native speaker mixing two languages that she is fluent in. As evidenced by Figure 1 and the comments of that post, this type of usage is considered to be Koreaboo speech, wherein Korean is used in a superfluous manner and out of context. 5. MOCK KOREABOO Since being a koreaboo is seen as undesirable by other K-pop fans, a form of mock language called Mock Koreaboo has been created. The concept of mock language was pioneered by Jane Hill in her article on “Junk Spanish” (1995). While she later switched the wording to “mock Spanish”, in this article she defines “Junk Spanish” as “a set of strategies for incorporating Spanish loan words into English in order to produce a jocular or pejorative key” (p. 205). Key aspects of mock language in this article are the pejoration of the mocked language, adoption of lexical and morphological material in order to do this pejoration, and the exaggerated mispronunciation of the mocked language. Mock Spanish is also part of a white American “light” register, where the meaning of Spanish material is completely stripped to create a non- serious variety of language for white Americans. While mock Spanish can uphold racist ideas, this is not always the case for mock languages. Chun (2004) investigates Korean-American comedian Margaret Cho’s use of “mock Asian and finds that Cho’s use of mock Asian is “legitimate”, showing that Cho uses the register not only to position herself in opposition to Asianness, but also to be critical of mock Asian as a practice. Her use of mock Asian can de-center whiteness and critique racist imaginings of Asian women. Another example of this intra-ethnic mockery appears again in Lo and Chi Kim (2012). The article describes a Korean comedy skit where Korean-Americans are in a Korean class, speaking Korean with bad grammar, heavy American accents, and plenty of English. While not described as so in the article, this sketch could be seen as an example of mock Korean-American, making fun of their poor command of their heritage language to platform their own savvy in languages and cultural references. Mock koreaboo can be found all around social media, including Twitter and a parody meme subreddit called r/kpoopheads. An example of mock Koreaboo is below (translations of Korean and Korean-derived mock Koreaboo in brackets): Chingoose [friends], I just learnt that joy unnie [gendered term of address] has started dating crush flop oppar [gendered term of address] me neomu [very] sed now, ottokhae [what do I do]?!1 Me sarang [love] joy unnie since me 2 year old, me thought joy unnie [gendered term of address] sarang [love] me bacc even tho me onli 11 I thought I felt something, but now I realised there was never any sarang [love] anyone else go through such betrayal? Ottokhae [what do I do]?? Me sarang [love] joy unnie [gendered term of address] but me get cheated on me go doxx unnie [gendered term of address] and crush flop oppar [gendered term of address] now, Onion chingoose [bye friends] FIGURE 2: A Reddit post containing Mock Koreaboo (Outrageous-Bottle-72 2021) In this passage, the poster writes as a Koreaboo character who is upset that a K-pop artist the poster likes has announced she is in a relationship. Prior to this post, K-pop singer Joy has announced her relationship to the K-pop singer Crush, respectfully referred to using the gendered terms of address unnie and oppar. Here, the poster mocks the attitude that some K-pop fans have regarding their favorite singers dating by pretending to be jealous of the relationship and betrayed by the singer Joy. Jealousy is a common theme among mock Koreaboo, mocking the perceived intense attachment to K-pop idols that koreaboos have.1 Mock Koreaboo is similar to koreaboo speech, but differs in several key ways. One of the most relevant ways it differs is the blatant and intentional misspellings. As seen Figure 2, the misspellings are not only of Korean, but English as well. This can be seen in the term onion/onion haseyo which is used for the Korean greeting annyeong [hi] or annyeong haseyo [hello]. In the above example we can also see chingoose, a deliberate misspelling of chingu, meaning friend in Korean. This term may also be mocking the out of context application of the English plural -s to the word, becoming chingus. Some of the English misspellings include bacc and sed. Description: Example: Deliberate misspellings of both Korean and English Chingoose [mock form chingu meaning friend], onion haseyo [mock form of annyeong haseyo meaning hello], delulu (delusional) Mock gendered terms of address Oppar, unnir Use of “sarang” as if an English verb I sarang [love] you High emoji use (common in mocking speech on the internet in general) Framing an unusual person as target of affection Lee Soo Man oppar (Lee Soo Man is the former CEO of SM Entertainment) TABLE 2: Features of Mock Koreaboo One of the most salient examples of Mock Koreaboo is shown through oppar. An intentional misspelling of oppa [gendered term of address], oppar directly mocks the overuse of the term by Koreaboo fans. The reason for the added -r on the end is not currently known, but may be because rhotic r is not found in Korean, marking “infelicitous, anglicized pronunciation” of the term (Jeong & Yu 2021: 832). A related form, unnir also exists as a mock form of unnie [gendered term of address]. Oppar is one of the key signs of Mock Koreaboo, is used by other K- pop fans even without using Mock Koreaboo. This, along with the themes of jealousy, seems to mock the attachment of fans to K-pop performers, specifically how they are “delusional” in thinking that K-pop artists are their romantic partners. This is especially true when oppar is used with an unusual person, such as entertainment company CEOs like Lee Soo Man, JY Park, and Bang Si Hyuk as company CEOs usually do not have a fanbase themselves.2 Like Mock Spanish, Mock Koreaboo is both pejorative as well as used in a humorous context (Hill 1995). The difference here is that instead of trying to mock a group of people for speaking their native language, Mock Koreaboo seeks to mock people for using a non-native language inappropriately. Instead of being racist itself, Mock Koreaboo is possibly trying to make fun of perceived racism through misusing the Korean language. Koreaboos are often seen as appropriative of Korean, using the language in inappropriate circumstances. Through exaggerating this appropriation, users of Mock Koreaboo can jokingly criticize the appropriation itself. Mock Koreaboo has a more limited use case, as well. Hill presents examples in all forms of media such as radio and birthday cards. Mock Koreaboo is limited more to directly mocking koreaboo fans and is mainly found on social media. As compared to Chun’s analysis of Margaret Cho’s mock Asian, mock Koreaboo is not necessarily a reclamation. The ethnic background of those who use mock Koreaboo is unknown, but it does not seem to be restricted to Korean or Asian people. It can be seen to fight racism in a similar way, but Koreaboo speech is not used with racist intent as Mock Asian is usually used. Mock Koreaboo seems to be more of a way to distinguish oneself from undesirable fans. 5.1. ELITIST STANCETAKING AND INDEXICAL ORDERS IN MOCK KOREABOO Mock Koreaboo is taking an elitist stance against Koreaboo fans. As Jaworski and Thurlow define it, elitism is making a claim to superiority based on whatever moral claim the speaker wants to distinguish themself (2009). Elitist stances work through evaluation, where the subject evaluates an object either positively or negatively, and implicitly evaluates another subject negatively, elevating the subject. An obvious example of this is the following tweet: All the delulu sasaengs crying : But OPPAR YOU LOOKED AT ME AND FELL IN LOVE DIDN’T YOU?! : as I said I didn’t make eye contact with armys3 for 2 years now….. (@sgtcurrypants 2021) In this tweet, the poster critiques “delusional stalker fans” who believe that a member of BTS fell in love with them. The tweet calls these fans “delusional stalker fans” delulu sasaengs where delulu is short for “delusional” and sasaeng is a Korean term for an obsessive fan. Some terms, like sasaeng and maknae which refers to the youngest member in a group or family, are considered acceptable uses of Korean by fans. I am not sure why this is at this time, but it is an option for further analysis. In the third line, the tiger emoji represents BTS member V, who in the video attached to the tweet spoke about not being able to see his fans. Here we see the poster using oppar as a clear marker of Mock Koreaboo, and the fans in this fake dialogue being portrayed as unreasonable through the attributed text in all caps and the content of the statement. The attributed text to V also portrays the fans as being unreasonable by directly dismissing them, treating them as ignorant. By portraying these “sasaeng” or stalker fans in this way, the poster is evaluating these fans as less than and positioning themselves as a better type of fan. They are distinguishing themselves from the fans that are obsessive and too into it. While this Tweet is explicit in its elitist stance, Mock Koreaboo itself is imbued with elitist stances. In Figure 2, Mock Koreaboo is used to discuss the jealousy of a fictional fan when their favorite idol has entered a relationship. Even though the poster has not explicitly compared themselves with another fan, even just using the mock register shows that they disapprove the jealous attitude and view themselves above it. Mock Koreaboo and its elitist stances constitute another order of indexicality, signaling the identity of being anti-Koreaboo and what being a Koreaboo represents. In this system of indexicality, Korean is the nth order, being the origin of the linguistic resources that both Koreaboo speech and Mock Korean use. Koreaboo speech is the n+1st order, characterized by having Korean words surrounded by otherwise non-Korean utterances, typically gendered terms of address, words of love, and basic vocabulary. It is differentiated from the nth order by having this mix of language resources and by primarily being used by non-Korean speakers as opposed to the Korean language itself. This n+1st order indexes being a fan of K-pop and someone who knows some Korean, due to its use by K-pop fans and fans of other Korean media. In the eyes of other fans, Koreaboo speech also indexes an obsession with Korean culture and the appropriation of Korean language. Mock Koreaboo is then the n+2nd order, innovating on Koreaboo speech. This order is linguistically characterized by its use of emojis, mock forms such as oppar, and misspellings common on the internet. It is largely similar to Koreaboo speech, but it is highly exaggerated and includes other mocking elements like the emojis. This indexical order incorporates the meaning of being a K-pop fan but adds the meaning of being a specific type of fan, one that disapproves of how Koreaboos use the Korean language and behave towards K-pop performers, due to its use by fans who actively make fun of Koreaboo fans. Mock Koreaboo specifically indexes that they think that being a Koreaboo, and therefore using Koreaboo speech, is inherently wrong. Through the exaggeration and mocking of these acts of appropriation, Mock Koreaboo clearly indexes this disapproval of the figure of the Koreaboo and the linguistic practices associated with it. In addition, the elitist stances imbued into Mock Koreaboo help create this separate indexical order. Ochs (1992) presented a view that stances are a way to indirectly index social meanings and acts. Through this view, the elitist stances work to indirectly index this identity of being anti-koreaboo. While what is shown directly is the superiority over those deemed to be Koreaboos, it indirectly indexes being a fan that is against the fetishization of Korean culture, and the appropriation of the Korean language, looking down up on the Koreaboos who do these things. 6. CONCLUSION Mock Koreaboo is a register among K-pop fans that utilizes elitist stances to index the disapproval of the fetishization of Korean culture. Through modifying a series of Koreaboo speech characteristics, non-Koreaboo fans are able to use pejoration to dismiss Koreaboo speech and signal their elite status as compared to Koreaboo fans. The use of these elitist stances with mock Koreaboo create an n+2nd indexical order, innovating on Koreaboo speech and indexing their disapproval of koreaboo fans. These fans are characterized as appropriating the Korean language, fetishizing Korean culture, and being extremely possessive of the K-pop stars that they like. Mock Koreaboo allows fans to distance themselves from this behavior and condemn it at the same time. This article explores how mock languages are being negotiated and used on the internet, particularly on an international scale. Previously, mock languages were primarily analyzed within the context of a certain country or location, such as Mock Spanish and Mock Asian being analyzed as an American phenomenon. In this case, Mock Koreaboo is international, being negotiated on the internet by people from all over the world. This adds to the growing literature of how the internet can change language by allowing various linguistic resources to spread globally and be used in novel, creative ways like Mock Koreaboo. Online language is important to study for this reason, as linguistic phenomena are used in new and exciting ways. REFERENCES Alim, H. Samy. 2009. 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