“BTS 한국어 배우기” is (and we very much hope that Google Translate is not letting us down here) “Learn Korean with BTS” in Korean. The K-pop megastars have created a new linguistic platform for fans outside of Korea to get to grips with their mother tongue.

Learn Korean With BTS runs on fan community platform Weverse which was set up by Big Hit Entertainment, the company behind not only BTS but also TXT, Seventeen and GFriend. On it, fans can access three-minute language tutorials from the group. There are 30 in total to get to grips with and the band members will be on hand to guide first-time speakers through it all.

The lessons draw on existing footage from Run BTS! (the band’s reality show) as well as YouTube-only shows such as Bangtan Bombs and BTS Episodes.

This is not some cobbled-together enterprise. Rather, it has a proper academic foundation as Professor Heo Yong from the Department of Korean Education at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies and researchers from the Korean Language Contents Institute were involved in its creation.

Big Hit Entertainment says it was developed in response to demand from fans constantly asking for subtitles to be added to video clips of the band.

What is interesting about this is not just that they are responding to fan demand but also how much the internationalisation of music is literally changing the lingua franca of pop.

It used to be that acts outside of the major Anglophonic markets had to sing and speak in English if they wanted even a crack at an international career. Post-‘Despacito’, songs sung in languages other than English are no longer castigated as novelty hits. English-Speaking audiences now have to be far less demanding that everything is served up to them in their own tongue.

Fans now understand they have to start to meet acts in the middle and, hopefully, pop polyglots will bloom.