The setting of my favorite film Blade Runner is in Los Angeles, 2019.

The official street lingo of that world is called Cityspeak, “a mishmash of Japanese, Spanish, German, what have you.” A part of this came true, but our jargon is a combination of English, Spanish, and Korean, in that order.

In this clip @ 1:32 the cop actually speaks Korean to Deckard, commanding “Iriwa”–“Come here.”

Now, it’s 2015 in LA and the city is more hybrid in culture and language than what the sci-fi work had predicted.

I’m a professor teaching Korean in Los Angeles. It’s amazing to me when I hear my students incorporate Korean, Spanish, and English slang words together to express themselves. If “To have a second language is to possess a second soul,” there are many inhabitants of LA with multiple souls.

We don’t have to wait until 2019. The future of LA is now.