South Korean influencers wow Bangladeshis and Indians with their love of Bengali language and culture
South Korean YouTuber Lee Jun-hak fell in love with Bengali culture and language when he arrived in India in 2016 for his university studies.
While pursuing a degree majoring in Hindi, Lee picked up the basics of Bengali grammar from local friends in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal and watched Bangladeshi news channels to improve his speaking skills.
His experience has since grown into an all-consuming passion with the creation of Bengali Lala, his Bengali-language YouTube channel, in early 2021. Since then, Lee's channel, which he runs from Seoul, has attracted almost 2,700 subscribers. He also runs Korean Ka Lala, his Hindi-language channel, which has 278,000 subscribers.
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"I love Bengal's unique culture and [knowing] the language is the best way to understand and experience the culture," the 26-year-old told This Week In Asia, who said he is a huge fan of the Bengali detective series Feluda and adventure series Kakababu.
"Bengalis are very similar to South Koreans - the cultural mindset, lifestyle, love for travelling and football," Lee said.
One of Lee's followers, Enakshi Bhattacharjee, says in a comment on Lee's Bengali Lala YouTube channel that she is mesmerised to hear a non-Bengali person speak the language impeccably.
In the past few years, Bengali - a language spoken by some 234 million people worldwide, including people in Bangladesh and Bengalis in India - has attracted more interest among South Koreans, particularly influencers who have gone viral on social media for speaking the language fluently.
Luna Yogini, also known as Dasom, shares updates in Bengali about her daily activities from Seoul and places she has travelled to with her 102,000 Instagram followers, such as driving at night in Kolkata, dancing with tribal women in Santiniketan in West Bengal and sporting a new hairdo.
In one video, Luna recommends a popular antiseptic cream used by many Indian Bengalis for chapped lips. In another, she ropes in her mother to sing a Bengali song praising Kolkata, which is home to 2.7 million Bengalis.
Luna began living in West Bengal when she was five years old and was brought up by her mother, who wanted her to grow up in a multicultural environment. The 35-year-old and her mother, who works as a yoga trainer, are currently living in Seoul and setting up a yoga studio there.
In one video, Luna explains in Bengali that she has grown to love India due to her growing up years in West Bengal and that she has friends and family members living there.
One of her followers, Prapti Bindu, praises Luna's fluency in Bengali, saying the South Korean influencer can speak the language better than most Bengalis.
Across the border in Dhaka, Joseph Kim runs Koreanbhai, a YouTube channel with some 369,000 followers from which he posts videos about his experience in Bangladesh, where he has lived for more than 12 years.
In one video, Kim says he began learning Bengali to know more about the country's culture while he was studying economics at the North South University in Bangladesh.
Kim, who calls himself a YouTuber, an entrepreneur and an activist, tells his followers that he has a dream of building a school for underprivileged children in the country. He has worked with a non-profit organisation to help local schools in Khulna, Bangladesh. In one video, Kim says the Bangladeshi culture makes him feel welcome in the country like he is part of a "big family".
One of his followers, Sheikh Ahmad Baki Billah, says Kim loves Bangladesh "more than many of us" and that the government should give him honorary citizenship. Another follower, Tonmoy Chowdury, urges Kim to continue staying in Bangladesh as he considers the South Korean a Bangladeshi citizen.
Bangladeshi-American Sharanika Akter, 30, discovered that more people followed her Instagram account after she shared videos last August of her wedding in New York, where she and her 33-year-old husband Sehee Kim observed traditional Bengali rites.
The number of her followers surged from 5,000 to 30,000 in three months, and she now has more than 100,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok.
The marketing manager at a US multinational has been sharing videos of the couple's life in New York, such as Kim learning to eat Bengali food with his hand, cooking chicken curry using Bengali spices and celebrating Ramadan and Eid holidays. Akter is also seen in videos learning more about Korean culture from Kim.
Conversely, South Korea's entertainment culture has also risen in popularity among people in India and Bangladesh in recent years, thanks partly to mega K-pop bands such as BTS and Blackpink.
A year ago, South Korean boy band Tan, girl group ICU and taekwondo performance team Nolja performed in Dhaka at a K-pop concert organised to celebrate the 50th anniversary of diplomatic ties between South Korea and Bangladesh. Ahead of the event, the band members of Tan endeared themselves to Bangladeshis after they spoke briefly in Bengali in a video about their concert in Dhaka.
There is also rising interest among South Koreans in the works of Bengali writers such as Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore and the history of Bangladesh.
Among them is South Korean poet Kim Yang-shik, who translated Tagore's collection of poems Gitanjali from English to Korean and set up the Tagore Society of Korea in Seoul in 1981.
Boston-based Korean academic Jeon Seung-hee, who has translated a novel by Bangladeshi author Shaheen Akhtar titled Talaash about the lives of Birangona women decades after the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, noted the rising popularity of Bengali culture among South Koreans. She explained this was partly due to the shared experiences of South Koreans and Bangladeshis in their fight to use their respective languages prior to independence.
The South Korean and Bengali languages also share some similarities such as grammar and sentence structure, said Jeon, who is an associate professor and the Korean coordinator at Boston College.
"The sounds of Korean and Bengali words are also similar. The Bengali writing system is phonetic, which is easy to learn," Jeon told This Week In Asia.
Such linguistic similarities are what spurred YouTuber Lee to learn the Bengali language in the first place, and he continues to attract more fans in South Asia due to his fluency.
"These similarities attracted me more to Bengali people and when I speak their language, they are more friendly to me," he said.
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
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