Rap as Korean Rhyme: Local Enregisterment of the Foreign[Note 1. An earlier version of this paper was presented at ...]

This article investigates how a “foreign” register of rap is emerging among South Korean rappers through debates and experiments. It focuses on a dispute about the essentiality and translatability of rhyming, a novel verbal‐artistic device, and traces how rhyme has become understood as a defining feature of the register of Korean rap. Korean rappers have grappled with metapragmatic definitions of the semiotic linkage between rhyme and rap and the realization of rhyme at a pragmatic level, performatively bringing into being new forms of rhyming, based on their knowledge of local registers and of the linguistic differences between Korean and English. This ongoing pragmatic/metapragmatic practice contributes to the register‐formation of Korean rap as a dynamic process that remains open to the creation of new strategies for realizing “Korean rhyme” in its genre‐history.