This paper examined how fans of K-pop, a mediatized musical genre from South Korea, negotiated the tugs of competing language norms within the transnational context of YouTube. The assay centers on interactions that appeared over thirty-three months and across eleven ‘reaction videos’ posted by two English-speaking fans. It explores the semiotic process by which these two speakers’ utterances of Korean names came to be heard as hybrid by their viewers, how viewers invoked diverse ideological frames when assessing these hybridities, and how local language practices and interpretations were molded as a result. Specifically, It displays how a purist ideology of linguistic absolutism, which idealized the ‘correct’ pronunciation of words, was overwhelmingly dominant and how K-pop fans’ contextualizations of forms as hybrid, or their hybridizations, triggered a discursive trajectory: once language was identified as hybrid, it entered a pathway toward purification, or the contextualization of language as pure