NCT’s Jaehyun And Lee Young Ji Trigger Reactions With AAVE Usage
NCT‘s Jaehyun was the latest guest on Lee Young Ji‘s popular drinking talk show, No Prepare (also known as My Alcohol Diary), as he is promoting his first solo album J.
During the show, Lee Young Ji challenged Jaehyun to an English battle since they are both known to be skilled English speakers. The clip went viral on TikTok, with 818.8K views at the time of writing.
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Netizens commented that they were shocked by Jaehyun’s modesty about his fluency, although he lived in the U.S. for at least four years. Many were also surprised to discover he had another name. His birth name is Jeong Jae Hyun, but he legally changed it to Jeong Yoon Oh (also romanized as Yuno).
Yet something else caught netizens’ attention: Jaehyun and Lee Young Ji instantly slipped into Blaccents when speaking English.
Netizens pointed out that Lee Young Ji had told Jaehyun that she speaks “TikTok English,” but clearly, by that, she meant she speaks AAVE (African-American Vernacular English).
Lee Young Ji is not the only person who has commonly mistakenly identified AAVE as “TikTok” or “Gen Z” slang. Read more about K-Pop idols’ usage of AAVE below.
