Probably ultimately derived from some foreign language, but the precise source is unclear. The word is highly unlikely to be a naturally developed Korean ideophone as there is no clear source within the language, and iconophones in Korean behave as adverbs, not nouns.
There is a perfect phonetic and semantic match to Italian bunga bunga. However, the word was popularized in Italian mainly by Silvio Berlusconi in 2011, whereas there is clear evidence that the Korean term was popular by at least the early 2000s. The earliest reliable attestation of the word may be from a South Korean arcade game released in 2001, Boong-Ga Boong-Ga, which uses it as a humorous term for kancho (a children's prank involving the anus). In the 2008 South Korean drama You Are My Destiny, Kang Jose (played by Park Jae-jung) said in a line about doing "bunga bunga (분가 분가, 分家分家, lit: branch family branch family)" that he pronounced it as "bung-ga bung-ga (붕가붕가)", which became a hot topic, at this time, netizens recognized this word as sex.[1] At least an article from 2009 said it meant humping by pets. [2]
As of 2020, some Korean-language wiki sites claim (without providing any corroborating evidence) that the term originated as slang for kancho in the 1980s.
| Romanizations | |
|---|---|
| Revised Romanization? | bunggabungga |
| Revised Romanization (translit.)? | bunggabungga |
| McCune–Reischauer? | punggabungga |
| Yale Romanization? | pungkapungka |
붕가붕가 • (bunggabungga)