The Evolution of Korean Terms of Address: The Euphemism Treadmill and Linguistic Agency
Young-mee Yu Cho1* and Sunju Park2
1Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ USA
2Yonsei University School of Business, Seoul, Korea
Submission: April 22, 2024;Published: May 28, 2024
*Corresponding author: Young-mee Yu Cho, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ USA
How to cite this article: Young-mee Yu C, Sunju P. The Evolution of Korean Terms of Address: The Euphemism Treadmill and Linguistic Agency. Open Access J Educ & Lang Stud. 2024; 2(1): 555578. DOI:10.19080/OAJELS.2024.02.555578.
Abstract
North Korean address terms generally reflect the socialist practice of employing language as a weapon for the revolution, most notably in the appropriation of tongmu ‘friend’ in the sense of “comrade.” Contemporary usage, however, reveals that hierarchical Confucian values of the past are impossible to eradicate, as shown by the introduction of tongchi ‘esteemed-comrade.’ On the other hand, the implementation of its linguistic-ideological counterpart in the South has been less systematic despite dramatic changes. The traditional Power and Solidarity semantics has evolved to include the indices of “intimacy” and “equality.” The default neutral title, Name+ssi, following the “euphemism treadmill” has lost ground to pseudo-kinship terms and ever-multiplying professional titles. This comparative and diachronic study demonstrates diverging and converging practices in North and South Korea, and to what extent individuals exercise linguistic creativity and freedom despite various prescriptive forces, ultimately arguing for the fluidity of sociolinguistic practices in a given society.
Keywords: Korean language; Terms of address; Comparative linguistics; Power and Solidarity; Traditional agriculture-based society
Introduction
One of the unique characteristics of the Korean language is the complex deployment of honorifics marked by a wide repertoire of linguistic elements: specialized vocabulary, speech levels, and terms of address [1]. Highly systematic variations of honorific language result from a conversation’s participants continually reassessing their relationship to one another and negotiating their positions in terms of degree of deference and intimacy, degree of situational formality, personal agency, and other sociolinguistic factors. This paper focuses on the practice of “Terms of Address” in North and South Korea, where political, cultural, regional, generational, gender-based, and interpersonal factors have produced diachronic changes and synchronic variations since the division of the peninsula.
Systematic variations of honorific language as an integral part of Korean and Japanese grammar have been the subject of intense research for the past four decades [1,2]. Earlier studies assume that the choice between an appropriate honorific/non-honorific form is dictated by social factors such as age, status, and gender. The recent shift in politeness research, however, has been based on functional studies in discourse context [3,4] where the data warrant more nuanced analyses, rather than simply relying on the static, deterministic notion of Power and Solidarity [5]. For instance, continual shifts in honorific endings that are often observed in a single speech situation [6] are often interpreted as instances of alternations in terms of pragmatic islands in the discourse, psychological involvement, relationship resets, or footing shifts, negotiation of identity, and listenership in interaction [7]. Likewise, dynamic variations in Terms of Address call for a diachronic cultural study that examines divergences and convergences of the North Korean socialist practices and the South Korean capitalistic “euphemism treadmill.”
Terms of Address as a Sociolinguistic Phenomenon
All languages have a set of terms reserved for address and for reference. For instance, English has address terms such as “you,” “Professor,” “sir,” “ladies,” “young man,” and “Mr. President.” While family members in older generations are generally called by kinship terms (e.g., “Mom,” “Grandma,” “Uncle”), first names instead of kinship terms such as “brother,” “sister,” “wife,” “nephew,” and “cousin” are used for those in the same or younger generations. Terms of address are the linguistic forms speakers use in addressing the collocutor(s). On the other hand, terms of reference are only used in non-address contexts and refer to the addresser’s relationship with the third person in the social context. Even though there is a significant overlap between terms of address and terms of reference, we will focus only on the former to identify its unique sociolinguistic dimension within interpersonal discourse.
More than any other aspect of grammar, address term usage directly encodes the social and psychological relationship between the interlocutors. Since the ground-breaking work by Brown and Gilman [5], variation within a linguistic community and across cultures has been a topic of great interest in diverse languages. They provided a framework to account for the selection of the second-person pronominal address terms in the European T-V distinction (originated from the Latin tu and vos) (German du/Sie, French tu/vous, Spanish tú/usted, and many others)1. The distinction was analyzed in terms of the two factors of Power and Solidarity, encoding politeness, social distance, and familiarity, as illustrated in Figure 1.
Brown and Gilman’s framework of Power and Solidarity semantics has been applied to understand the distinction between the symmetrical and asymmetrical uses of “familiar T” and “respectful V” in European languages [8,9]. Power is based on differences in age, sex, class, and social status, while Solidarity comes from a shared membership to a social institution, such as family or school, indicating a degree of closeness. A person lower in the hierarchy uses “V” toward a person with more power and receives “T” in an asymmetrical relation whereas Solidarity calls for the symmetrical use of “T.”
Address usage comes in two forms, a nominal address term and its referential term, i.e., a pronominal address term. Second-person pronouns in Korean are highly restricted, as one of the seven languages (out of 207) identified by Helmbrecht [10] that have no polite form of second-person pronouns. They happen to be all Asian languages (Burmese, Indonesian, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese). Sohn [1] notes that there is “no deferential second-person pronoun” in Korean, “except for the rare form of elusin which refers exclusively to a respected male of over sixty years of age” (p. 207). However, a recent government-backed campaign has successfully promoted the use of elusin as a gender-neutral second-person pronoun for all elderly people. It is not clear why Korean pronominal address terms are not fully developed, but we speculate that it has something to do with the cultural taboo of addressing the interlocutor in higher position directly either by a proper name or a pronoun [11,12]. Traditional Korean society devised ways to avoid direct address terms by resorting to titles in the government bureaucracy or many invented names: there were amyong, a special childhood name, cha given by elders in the family as a sign of adulthood, literary names of diverse symbolic meanings known as ho that are either given by oneself or others, all of which were used instead of the official proper name recorded in the genealogy.
Languages like Korean and Japanese that greatly restrict the use of pronouns and personal names employ a whole array of nominal address terms to encode symmetrical and asymmetrical relationships in conversation. Consequently, Korean nominal address terms have received more attention than the pronoun system as an integral part of the honorific system. Furthermore, address terms closely interact with other aspects of honorific language use. For instance, it is imperative to match the deferential speech level that is marked as a verbal ending with an appropriate address term such as sensayng-nim ‘honored teacher’ and sachang-nim ‘honored owner of a company.’ Grammatical linguistic agreement regarding honorifics can be manipulated when the speaker employs intentional mismatches for comic effects or as an expression of sarcasm to indicate the speaker’s intention to cancel the honorific treatment of the addressee.
1Modern English has only one second person pronoun, you, merged from the second person singular ‘thou’ and the second person plural ‘you.’ By the 13th century, English adopted the practice of using the plural ‘you’ to refer to a singular person in polite and formal contexts, as in “your majesty.” This English T-V distinction disappeared in the 20th century as the use of ‘you’ expanded regardless of the social status between the interlocutors, and the use of ‘thou’ is now considered archaic.
Terms of Address in Korean
Korean honorifics encode the relationship between interlocutors to a greater degree than any other aspect of Korean grammar. Recent studies have uncovered the weakness in the traditional assumption that the honorific/deferential forms statically reflect deference and formality of macro-sociological forces, transcending a rigid system of Power and Solidarity by finer patterns of usage and their social and indexical meanings [3,13-15].
Building on the Power and Solidarity semantics, over the past three decades studies on address terms have fine-tuned it to analyze the diverse and fluid reality of actual usage in a speech community. In particular, speakers make a particular choice out of a number of options in specific contexts in order to construct and negotiate social and personal meanings. The phenomenon of variability has often been investigated in terms of indexicality. Changes and variations in address terms provide a fertile ground to investigate variations in terms of social indexicality, which is defined as “structures of values that mediate between linguistic forms and the contextual dimensions that are invoked by their use” [16]. An indexical relationship is created when a linguistic form indexes (or points to) a contextual meaning [17,18]. Studies based on indexicality have been quite successful within the social context of rank, gender [19], and honorifics [3,14].
By employing indexicality, we investigate language in context with an explicit tool that connects formal linguistic features with social meanings [18]. As the addresser operates within a large framework of social norms defined by macro-sociological Power and Solidarity, the misuse of address terms has the potential to alienate the addressee. However, there is also room for addresser agency in choosing from a variety of terms to index social and personal meanings. This nuanced account is more compatible with approaches that understand honorifics as “a kind of expressive meaning” [20,21], rather than rigid grammatical constraints.
Whereas earlier studies focused on classifying address terms along predefined, socially prescribed notions [22], research in the past two decades has revealed that honorific and non-honorific speech choice, as a dynamic system, does not statically reflect deference and formality. This is mainly because the terms of address reveal not only social relations characterized by degree of deference and formality and conversation-specific circumstances, but also hint at the speaker’s identities and psychological stance. Within the constraint of macro-semantics defined by Power and Solidarity, there is ample room for variation and speaker agency because the relationship between conversation partners shifts continually.
Although the Power and Solidarity semantics was originally proposed for second-person pronominal address terms, Sohn [23] extends it to nominal address terms. There is a fundamental difference in address usage used by children and by adults. Children of the same age and grade level either use the full name of the addressee without a suffix or a given name with the vocative suffix (-ya after a name ending in a vowel and -a after a name ending in a consonant). These intimate forms are specially reserved among children or for an adult to address a child. The childhood terms can continue into adulthood for relationships formed during pre-adulthood, although more indirect forms are chosen in a public setting, based on job titles or teknonymy (e.g., ‘someone’s mother’ or ‘someone’s father’). Relationships formed in college exhibit transitional characteristics between children’s terms and the adult usage.
Divergences between North and South Korea
Korean history is characterized by its remarkable continuity, both socially and politically [24]; only three dynasties (Silla (675-935), Korye (918-1392), and Chosen (1392-1910)) ruled from the 7th to the 20th century. The tumultuous history of the 20th century includes the 35-year colonial occupation by Japan (1910-1945), the development of two separate regimes, and the division of Korea and the Korean War. In addition, Korean diaspora, which began with migration to Manchuria and immigration to Hawaiian sugar plantations in the late 19th century, expanded during the colonial period into Japan, China, and Russian territories.
The abrupt division of the Korean peninsula into two opposing cold-war political systems, along with the forces of immigration and globalization, has brought about dramatic linguistic divergences unprecedented in Korea’s millennia-old history. The political and demographic landscape had a dramatic effect on converting the Korean language, a traditional monocentric language, into pluri-centric forms-a change from one standard form to several interacting codified standard forms [25]. Besides the Korean used in the two states of Korea, there is Korean Chinese, known as Chaoxianzu (朝鲜族) in China, one of the 56 officially recognized ethnic minorities in China, concentrated in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture. Recently this group has been emigrating heavily to South Korea, searching for job opportunities. Korean Japanese, Zainichi (在日) Koreans, are the second-largest ethnic minority group in Japan. They are long-term Korean residents whose origins date back to the colonial period, and who often retain their South or North Korean nationalities and affiliations. In addition, there are Koreans in the Commonwealth Independent States of the former USSR, known as Koryo-saram. There are also two million Koreans in North America. The diasporic expansion of Koreans has resulted in systematic variations in language forms in multiple centers. This paper focuses on the evolution of address terms covering the eight decades since the division of the Korean peninsula into South and North in 1945.
Although the linguistic forms of the two Koreas are varied to some extent, primarily due to the dialectal differences between Seoul and Pyongyang, the two standard forms, South Korean “Standard Language” and North Korean “Cultured Language,” remain mutually intelligible despite systematic top-down language policies each state has implemented since the division.
Address Terms in North Korea
Despite overall commonalities between the two Koreas, there are also marked differences. Firstly, North Korean address terms reflect the socialist practice of employing language as a weapon for the revolution [26], most notably in the appropriation of the common native word tongmu ‘friend’ in the sense of “comrade,” consciously adopted from communist countries in the early 20th century, highlighting maximal solidarity against “feudal” power hierarchies [27]. The origin of the word is not well-established. However, by the 17th century, tongmo was considered a native-Korean word according to Nokeltay, the standard bilingual textbook series for Korean Interpreters of Chinese Language during the Chosen Dynasty (1392-1910), as shown in Figure 2.
The Chinese character 伴 is annotated by two native-Korean words, pes and tongmo, both of which are written in the Korean alphabet, along with its pronunciation, pan2. By the 19th century, tongmo was used in the sense of “partners” among miners under the same management (tektay) and among itinerant peddlers (popusang). These groups were tightly knit professional guilds that relied on strong bonds of solidarity among the members crucially for survival.
In the early 20th century, the word tongmu, with the final vowel raised from [o] to [u], following a prevalent phonological process, expanded its semantic meanings to “close friend.”3 The widespread use of tongmu evoking the nuances of warm childhood friendship overshadowed the use of such synonymous words as pes, tongchi, and chinkwu. Numerous children’s songs composed between the 1920s and 1950s (e.g., Uli Tongmu “Our Friend,” Iyaki Kil “Chatting Road,” Tongmutula “Hey, Friends”) attested to its common usage denoting affectionate childhood friendships. In this context, the native word tongmu was appropriated as the translation of the communist term, “comrade,” rather than the Chinese 同志 tóng zhì (literally meaning “same purpose”), a translation of the Russian term товарищ that was also adopted in Japan (dooshi) and Vietnam (đồng chí). In Korea, however, the word tongji 同志 referred to “progressive intelligentsia” in the late 19th century and early 20th century. It was used in the context of engaging in the Anti-Japanese movement and Korean independence, rather than in the socialist sense of “comrade.”
Korea in the 1920s under Japanese occupation saw a division of anti-colonial activists between the moderate Western-looking nationalists and the more radical socialists who were inspired by the Soviet Union and Communist movements abroad. The adoption of tongmu by the latter group because of its native origin with working class connotations (e.g., miners, peddlers, classless childhood friends) symbolizes the prime socialist value of flattening Power and maximizing Solidarity in discourse. It represents egalitarian communist ideals and fits well with North Korea’s hangul-only policy shortly after its foundation in 1948 and its ideology of Juche “self-reliance” based on political independence, military self-reliance, and Korean nationalism as it was consolidated in the 1960s and 1970s by Kim Il Sung [24]. The continued use of tongmu by progressive radical revolutionaries that started in the colonial period (1910-1945) and continued into the North Korean state (1948- ) endowed the word with a clear ideological tint which diverged radically from the apolitical meaning of a “close friend” in the 1920s and 1930s.
2. Whether tongmo has a Chinese etymology or not cannot be determined. Many folk etymologists assume that tong is derived from the Chinese morpheme dong 同 ‘same’ as in dongmo ‘plotting together’ (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%EB%8F%99%EB%AC%B4). However, by the 17th century it was considered a native-Korean word; hence the hangul transcription in Nokeltay.
3. The earliest published example we can identify is Talsŏng Pak’s (1920) article, calling for ch’engnyen tongmu ‘young friends’ to action.
According to Ryang’s [28] careful study of North Korean Language, the Department of Linguistics of the North Korean Academy of Social Sciences played an important role in utilizing language in nation building. In particular, Kim Il Sung’s conversations with linguists published in 1964 and 1966 by the Department of Linguistics emphasized the need to eliminate Sino-Korean words: “improving the linguistic cultural standards of the North Korean working class” and “centrally controlling the vocabulary of the Korean language” [28]. In the 1960s and 1970s, the North Korean state actively implemented state-initiated reforms based on Kim Il Sung’s ideas.
Incidentally, Park Chung Hee’s strong anti-communist rule (1961-1979) in South Korea resulted in the term tongmu being wiped out and the widespread adoption of chinkwu in its place. Users of tongmu were considered communist sympathizers or North Korean spies and brutally persecuted. Sanitizing use in the national education system and the heavily censored press decimated its usage, except for a handful of innocuous compound words, as listed in (1).
(1) Compounds with tongmu
ekkay-tongmu ‘putting arms around each other’s shoulder’
kil-tongmu ‘travel friend’
mal-tongmu ‘talk friend’
ssi-tongmu ‘precious friend like a seed of a plant’
sokkup-tongmu ‘friends who playhouse together’
Figure 3 is a cover of Ekkay-Tongmu, a children’s magazine that was published 1967-1987 by an educational foundation controlled by Park Chung Hee’s wife and daughters. The ‘offensive’ word tongmu in the title escaped the censorship because it was part of a compound word.
Despite such a divergence, the South and North Korean dictionary definitions of the terms do not accurately represent the reality, other than the entries ① and ② in the North Korean dictionary.
Definitions of tongmu and chinkwu
Korean Naver dictionary (https://stdict.korean.go.kr/search/searchView.do)
tongmu: ① A close friend ② A co-worker in pair work
chinkwu: ① A close friend
② (informally to someone of similar age) A reference term to someone close
Korean dictionary (https://endic.naver.com/krenEntry.nhn?sLn=kr&entryId=b55f494e4e1c47a2b9625842f80392c9)
tongmu: ① A comrade engaged in proletariat revolutions
② an address or reference term for a revolutionary comrade
③ A general term of address
chinkwu: ① A close friend ② an informal address term to someone close
Contemporary usage in North Korea, however, reveals that Confucian values of the past are impossible to wipe out, shown by the introduction of the Sino-Korean tongchi 同志 to encode Power [28]. In order to express utmost loyalty and reverence to the leaders, tongchi was reintroduced, as seen by “Witayhan Kim Il Sung Tongchi” (‘The Great Leader, Kim Il Sung Comrade’). There is a clear connection between the creation of new vocabulary and the revolutionized applications of old words to the two linguistic manuals of the 1970s: Comrade Kim Il Sung’s Ideas on Language [Created] during the Anti-Japanese Armed Struggle and Their Brilliant Realization (1970) and The Speech Art of Korean (1975)4. Ryang attributes the emergence of North Korean Juche linguistics as a political ideology to these manuals that directly reflected Kim Il Sung’s linguistic theory and recommendations. Moreover, a new linguistic hierarchy for Kim Il Sung and his family was constructed “as an entirely untouchable, sacred realm” [28].
The initial attempt to erase the social hierarchy by universally applying tongmu in the beginning of the establishment of the North Korean state proved to be unsuccessful. Although it was not as prevalent as in South Korea, the use of various pseudo-family and rank terms has emerged to mark respect and intimacy (abai-tongchi ‘parents (honored)-comrade,’ pise-tongmu ‘secretary-comrade’) [29]. The result is the dyads shown in Figure 4, where ironically Power, not Solidarity, plays the most significant role in distinguishing the two most common terms in North Korea.
The top-down approach to linguistic forms for ideological goals was promoted through state-initiated grammar books such as Our Life and Language (1963) and The Rules of Korean (1966). These books were nationally circulated to create a unified national language of the new socialist North Korea by minimizing regional dialects and to recommend the people to “speak politely and respectfully when addressing one’s fellow citizens” [28]. It was strongly discouraged to use panmal, the non-honorific form used when addressing equal or younger as well as lower-ranked persons [28]. In particular, yelepun (‘you honored persons’), tongchi (not tongmu) to refer to the audience and the humble form of first-person pronoun, ce (not ne) were prescribed in public speech.
Even though the honorific/non-honorific dichotomy was derived from a traditional hierarchy based on class stratification and differentiations in status, gender and age, the language books emphasize “to create a new and egalitarian socialist culture” through the use of honorific language. As a manifestation of the “virtue of Communists,” the highest honorific form (known as the deferential -supnita form) is recommended when addressing comrades, regardless of rank or position. Ironically, shorter egalitarian forms that are lower in the honorific scale were not recommended even when addressing a younger person, which violates the linguistic norm of Korean language use. In other words, diverse forms in natural speech and appropriate language use in various social contexts were encouraged to be flattened to the direction of honorific language.
The emphasis on honorifics necessarily entails the use of Sino-Korean words that are considered more polite than their native counterparts (e.g., Native nai ‘age’ and cip ‘home’ vs. Sino-Korean yense ‘esteemed age’ and taek ‘esteemed home’). The use of tongmu has been gradually limited to an addressee of equal or lower standing while tongchi is used to show respect. Yu [30]5 reports that when he addressed an elderly professor in Pyongyang as apai-tongmu ‘father-comrade,’ he was corrected to use apai-tongchi ‘father (honored)-comrade (honored).’ In Pyongyang he was addressed as kyoswu-tongmu ‘professor-comrade,’ rather than kyosu-nim ‘professor-honored’ as in South Korea. The honorific suffix -nim is attached only to the three Kims (e.g., changkwun-nim ‘honored General,’ swuryeng-nim ‘honored Supreme Leader’).
4Full references are not available for none of the language books published in North Korea.
Increased contact between the two countries in recent years has resulted in converging practices, especially in the adoption of South Korean pseudo-family terms by North Korean youths. It is reported that North Korean youths are adopting the South Korean usage of pseudo-family terms as a result of their exposure to South Korean TV programs [31]. Over the past twenty years, around 33,000 North Korean refugees have settled in South Korea. A massive migration of Korean Chinese who had contact only with North Korea before 1992 increased indirect contact between South and North Korea6. There were five North-South summit meetings from 2000 to 2018, which were broadcasted extensively in South Korea. There are numerous testimonials from North Korean refugees about their surprise about the use of oppa ‘older brother’ for a boyfriend, lover, or husband in South Korea. North Korean terms of address among young people were limited to Name+tongmu, Name+tongchi (when there is a significant age difference), or just a name, therefore, the recent adoption of oppa is criticized by prescriptive grammarians in the North [32].
Address Terms in South Korea
Compared to what happened in North Korea, implementation of its linguistic-ideological counterpart in the South has been less systematic for address terms. Since Korean independence in 1945, there have been sporadic linguistic purification movements to shed Japanese words. However, changes have been more dramatic, following a total upheaval of social structure, spurred by the rapid industrialization, urbanization, and globalization of the past 80 years. Reflecting ongoing westernization and democratization, the overall language ideology in South Korea has shifted from traditional hierarchical values to increasingly egalitarian solidarity.
In the space of a few generations, South Korea has transformed itself from a traditional agriculture-based society to a cosmopolitan nation. The population of the Korean peninsula a century ago was 12.5 million people, of which 90% lived in farming villages, principally growing rice. Most villages consisted of a few extended families along the patrilineal line. On the other hand, in the 21st century, over 90% of the South Korean population live in urban areas, and, most surprisingly, around half of the population lives in the larger metropolitan area of Seoul. Today, only 4% of the South Korean workforce are farmers, about half of whom are over 65 years old. Family structure has changed too-from the traditional extended family, to the nuclear family, and finally to single-person households and other non-traditional variants. These profound sociological transformations naturally have induced changes in cultural practices, including linguistic behavior.
Whereas it is hard to gain access to systematic data from North Korea other than a handful of state guidelines and testimonials by refugees and visitors, there is an abundance of ethnographic data and sociolinguistic analyses about linguistic practices in South Korea from the past forty years. Figure 5 shows South Korean terms.
When the power relationship is clearly established (characterized by [+power]), a person with less power is obligated to use socially prescribed terms, while the person with more power has more options. For example, an adult can call a school-age person in several ways: FN7, FN+haksaeng ‘student,’ Full Name+ haksaeng ‘student.’ Asymmetry is expected in the [+power] dyads. However, between people characterized by [–power, –solidarity], there is very limited choice with almost no negotiation between the two people. In the [+solidarity] and [+power] dyads, the address terms exhibit the most variability, as in (3).
5https://www.joongang.co.kr/article/3638183#home
6Since 1992 when Korea established diplomatic relations with China, Chinese Koreans have migrated to South Korea for economic opportunities. Currently one million Chinese Koreans reside in South Korea, about half of the entire population.
(3) Common Usage [14]
i. [−power, −solidarity] dyad: LN+FN+ssi (‘Mr./Ms.’)8, LN+FN+nim (‘honored person’)
ii. [−power, +solidarity] dyad: Intimate Vocative, Rank Term and Sibling Term
iii. [+power, −solidarity] dyad: Neutral Title, English Loanword Title, Junior Title
iv. [+power, +solidarity] dyad: Honorific Professional Title, Pseudo Kinship Term
Although linguistic variations are known to reflect speakers’ social factors like age, gender, and socio-economic status [33], the social meanings of address terms are complex and fluid because the speakers’ identities often shift in real-life communicative interactions. The actual usage is much more varied and fluid than suggested by the simplistic Power and Solidarity semantics as the speaker constantly negotiates and indexes social meanings by the choice of an address term. Social identity is defined as “the social positioning of self and other” [34] through many factors like ethnicity, age, gender, social status, and power. An individual’s identification in various groups is a basis of linguistic behavior; identity is dynamic because it is constantly reconstructed by group membership and personal sense of (non)belonging to groups. More than any other aspects of language, a personal name is an essential part of one’s self and social identity. According to Jenkin [35], people actively construct who they are by adopting and rejecting linguistic signs. For instance, a recent movement to adopt “they” as a singular gender-neutral pronoun is a socio-political statement against gender binarity.
Another key concept in sociolinguistic research is the community of practice (CoP) framework [36,37]. In a CoP, individuals share social practices and actions through mutual engagement. Naturally, sociolinguistic characteristics such as honorifics and address terms are constantly constructed and negotiated in conversation with individual and group perspectives. As a result, real-life data provides a far wider variability than those choices sanctioned by prescriptive directives the society at large is trying to impose on individual speakers.
Even in the [+power, +solidarity] dyad, we witness a gradience that encodes a fine-grade power hierarchy. The most deferential way of addressing your superior is Title+nim ‘titular honorific suffix’ (e.g., sachang-nim ‘company president,’ hakchang-nim ‘Dean’). The next in hierarchy is LN+Title+nim (e.g., Kim sachang-nim ‘President Kim,’ Yu sensayng-nim ‘Teacher Yu’). Interestingly, Full Name+Title+nim is considered more polite than LN+Title+nim9. There are studies that investigate the usage patterns in a specific community of practice, such as the use of address terms among professors in a university [38]. Faculty members in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering show a different pattern of preferences among the commonly used terms sengsayng-nim ‘Teacher,’ kyoswu-nim ‘Professor,’ and paksa-nim ‘Doctor.’
When there is no title, Name+nim or Name+ssi is used depending on gender, closeness, formality, and situation10. Since many people who are status-conscious prefer being called by their job titles in public, a new address usage was introduced in the past few decades, as exemplified in (4).
(4) Newly emerged job titles as address terms11
Park pyenhosa Lawyer Park
Kim kanhosa Nurse Kim
Min kemsa Prosecutor Min
Bong kamtok Director Bong
Yi senswu Athelete Yi
Yun kica Journalist Yun
In addition, new job titles in business have introduced a multitude of new address terms, such as thim-chang ‘team head,’ inten ‘intern,’ khaphi ‘copywriter,’ and siti ‘creative director.’ When there are no official job titles, position names are appropriated as address terms (e.g., sinip ‘new employee,’ alpa ‘part-timer’).
South Korea is an age- and hierarchy-conscious society. There are three methods to count age, but as of June 28, 2023, the civil code was changed to abandon the most popular method, called “Korean Age,” that starts from being considered one-year-old at birth and adding an additional year every year on January 1st. The so-called man age corresponds to the common Western way of starting from zero at birth and adding a year at each birthday, which will be enforced uniformly, except for continuing to apply “Year Age” that starts from zero at birth and adds one year every January 1st for calculating eligibility for starting mandatory primary education and military enlistment, and for limiting drinking and smoking12.
7The following abbreviations are used: FN (First Name), LN (Last Name).
8The English translation of ssi in Korean and san in Japanese is Mr./Ms./Mrs., but their usages in the three languages are quite complex.
9Among Korean Americans, it is common to use FN+Title+nim when the first name is an English name rather than a Korean name, as in Michael sensayng-nim ‘Teacher Michael,’ instead of Kim sensayng-nim. Such localized hybridization must be the result of incorporating the first-name-basis American culture in the context of the Korean practice of adding an appropriate title to show respect.
10Another hybridized practice involves a “teacher-ese” adopted by teachers of Korean as a Foreign Language in American universities, where undergraduate and graduate students are addressed by FN+ssi, and older adult learners by FN+sensyang-nim ‘honored teacher.’
11These professional titles are often abbreviated when used among colleagues in a close age range, as in pyen, kan, and kem (or puro).
The proliferation of novel address terms is based on the Korean avoidance of using actual names towards a listener older or higher in social status, as discussed in Section 2. Sometimes a speaker knows a person who is older only by geononymy, the place name associated with the addresser, or teknonymy, the name of the addressee’s child.
In the [–power, +solidarity] dyad, there are many more individual choices. In addition to FN, FN+ssi, LN+FN+ssi and senbay (‘senior’), age-appropriate and gender-appropriate sibling terms are adopted to express how close the speaker feels to the listener in more or less symmetrical relationships. People with a slightly lower ranking (in terms of age, school year, and social status) usually initiate a sibling term (such as enni ‘a female’s older sister,’ oppa ‘a female’s older brother,’ hyeng ‘a male’s older brother,’ or nwuna ‘a male’s older sister’). There are numerous scenes in Korean dramas that signal a significant shift in the relationship toward intimacy after a dramatic bonding experience by changing from (LN)+FN+ssi to FN+hyeng/enni/oppa. Lee and Cho [14] identify this third indexing device and call it Intimacy to account for the ubiquitous shift to pseudo-kinship and the Japanese use of chan/kun by adult speakers in lieu of the default LN+san. This phenomenon of the ever-multiplying use of pseudo-family terms has been noted by numerous researchers [39,40]. The changing usage of oppa illustrates an interesting development in dictionary definitions: (1) as a kinship term (1907-1945); (2) for an older male acquaintance in addition to family members; (3) as a male in a romantic relationship, in addition to the above two meanings (1990-present) [41].
Over the past three decades, Full Name+ssi, once considered the default neutral title, has been replaced by ever-multiplying pseudo-kinship terms (oppa ‘older brother’ for a boyfriend, imo ‘maternal aunt’ for a babysitter). Moreover, new terms were promoted by the service industry (e.g., department stores and big restaurant chains), some of which have been coined to meet capitalistic needs (son-nim ‘guest/customer,’ kogayk-nim ‘customer’) for the [+power, –solidarity, –intimacy] dyad [42-44]. After several decades of use, Name+ssi now carries the meaning of ‘distance’ and ‘not-being-properly-polite’ even when age and status differences between the two speakers are minimal, and is now being replaced by newer terms. Similarly, in order to avoid the appearance of disrespect and distance, the once-default term, Full Name+ssi, is replaced by two kinds of terms: (1) professional titles for added deference and (2) kinship terms to show Intimacy. In the service sector industry (e.g., bank, hospital, government office), Full Name+ssi is being replaced by Full Name+nim (‘honored person’), a further indication that ssi is not considered polite or formal enough. Because there is no fixed address term in the [–power, –solidarity, –intimacy] group, customers, both male and female, in a restaurant often choose to call a waitress imo ‘mother’s female sibling’ or enni ‘older sister’ [42,45,46]. Commercialization of family terms is also observed in address terms within K-Pop groups (mat-hyeng ‘the eldest brother,’ maknay ‘the youngest sibling’) as well as in TV entertainment programs (hyeng ‘older brother,’ nwuna ‘older sister’ among show hosts and guests).
This phenomenon of the multiplication of address terms is partly due to a common social practice called the “euphemism treadmill.” Coined by Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate [47] to refer to a process whereby words that are introduced to replace an offensive word over time become offensive themselves. People invent new “polite” words to replace emotionally laden or distasteful words, but the euphemism again becomes tainted by association to the real thing that the word refers to and acquires its own negative connotations. For example, “PTSD” was introduced in the Vietnam era to replace “operational exhaustion” used during the Korean War, which replaced World War II era’s “battle fatigue,” itself a replacement for the World War I term “shell shock.” The change from “lame” to “crippled” to “handicapped” to “disabled” to “physically challenged” is another example of the euphemistic treadmill in action. Society keeps inventing new vague words to avoid direct reference to uncomfortable things. (5) illustrates two cases from Korean. Sachang-nim ‘head of a company’ is now commonly used to an owner of any business (a drycleaner, a mom-and-pop store, a street-vendor, etc.) or to any middle-aged man whose occupation is unknown; two new terms (tayphyo and hoychang) have emerged to refer to the president of a company of a substantial size.
(5) Cases of Korean euphemism treadmill
1. domestic helper: sikmo ‘food-mother’’ à phachulpu ‘hired help’ à
12https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/28/world/asia/south-korea-age.html (retrieved on June 28, 2023)
13The practice of using the roman alphabet initials for the purposes of abbreviation started with prominent politicians’ names (YS for Kim Youngsam, DJ for Kim Dae-jung and JP for Kim Jong-pil) in the 1990s. It not only provides a practical solution for media headlines but signals an abstract device of reference devoid of the need to attach cumbersome terms such as ‘President’ and ‘Teacher.’ Using initials for addressing colleagues in the workplace is a more recent phenomenon. The use of English names and initials provides employees a feeling of equality that transcends the social constraints imposed by the differences in age, gender, and rank.
14According to Seung-A Yu (2019), 62% of 1,000 respondents agreed with the need for gender-neutral terms (https://hrcopinion.co.kr/ archives/14341) (retrieved on June 1, 2023).
kasa toumi ‘home help’ à toumi imonim ‘helper auntie (honorific)’
2. owner of business: sachang ‘head of company’ à tayphyo ‘representative,’
hoy-chang ‘CEO’
In addition to the examples in (5), the two terms referring to waitresses in cafes and bars, saeksi ‘young bride’ and akassi ‘young lady in aristocratic family,’ have been sexualized, as is the case with words for women in other languages [48,49]. The first term, saeksi, fell completely out of use either in its original meaning of ‘young bride’ or its extended meaning of ‘waitress.’ In urban areas and among young people, akassi is an insulting term to be avoided, sometimes causing a fight between an elderly customer and a young female server. One strategy that customers have consciously adopted to avoid sexualized terms is to utilize non-personal, gender-neutral indexical nouns, yekiyo ‘here,’ cekiyo ‘there’ or yeposeyo ‘hello’ in ordering food.
Intimacy indexing through using pseudo-kinship terms in a business setting is a relatively recent phenomenon. In a humorous essay, Yu [30] reports that she is called at least by two dozen names, most of which are real and pseudo-kinship terms, and concludes that she prefers being called by her Full Name+ssi because it implies equality between the interlocutors. However, as she applauds the change for more equality, she confesses that “it is considered poor manners if a much younger person or a person in a much lower social standing calls you by that title” (p. 30). In the past, kinship terms were used in intimate relationships. For instance, family terms such as “mother,” “father,” “grandmother,” “aunt” or “uncle” were used to a close friend of one’s parents or to relatives of a close friend. What is different now is the specificity of the term selected and the widespread usage throughout the society: imo ‘mother’s sister’ for mother’s close friend or any woman of a similar age, ape-nim ‘honored father’ for a friend’s father or any man of a similar age, enni as a young server in a restaurant, imo-nim for middle-aged service workers (e.g., food servers, nannies, etc.). Ironically, yeosa, the term once reserved specifically for the wife of a high official (as in “The First Lady”), is now frequently used for addressing cleaning ladies and elder care workers, often from ethnic minority groups.
According to a study on Korean college students, Koh [50] reports that in the group characterized by [–power, +solidarity], three terms are most often used to address a slightly older classmate: senpay[nim] ‘senior,’ age- and gender-appropriate sibling terms, or FN+ssi. The choice (FN+ssi < senpay[nim] < gender-appropriate sibling terms) is determined by the increasing sense of Intimacy the speaker indexes towards the addressee. The speaker negotiates with all available factors (gender, age, rank, and intimacy) and selects the most comfortable nominal address term in a given situation.
While the other factors are not subject to change in the short term, Intimacy is the one factor that often changes as the relationship develops, in which case the speaker exerts a certain amount of control and initiates change based on his/her own highly subjective criterion. Once the safest way to address a hearer, Korean Name+ssi is now low in the Intimacy scale and yet not formal enough in a public setting. It seems to be chosen as the last resort after the rank terms and kinship terms are chosen and no other address terms are appropriate. The demotion of Name+ssi inaugurated a new usage: Name+nim among graduate students in universities. Professors in natural science and technology fields often run a research group consisting of graduate students at varying stages of their degree program. Instead of pseudo-family names and seonpay ‘senior,’ some students call each other by FN+nim regardless of age or level differences. Earlier uses of ‑nim were limited to government offices or banks where Full Name+nim is still used across age, gender, and social status, along with such terms as 3-pen kokayk-nim ‘#3 customer’ and 1-pen minwen-nim ‘first person in line to submit a civil complaint.’ This new usage in a college setting is an innovation, analogous to many (mostly failed) attempts at start-up companies to promote equality by getting rid of job titles and calling each other by English names or initials. This new address term conveniently solves the thorny problem of determining the appropriate term when rank (senpay ‘senior’ and hwupay ‘junior’) and age conflict - i.e., seniors who are younger than the addressers and juniors who are older than the addressers.
One professor I interviewed remarked that she was heartened at this democratic experiment to create an equal and inclusive (but not too intimate) work environment, somewhat like American first-name address with an added psychological distance (with the honorific suffix). She has also observed that one student could vary the terms from Full Name+ssi in a large lecture session, FN+ssi in a group meeting, and a pseudo-family term (FN+hyeng ‘brother’) in private conversations. On the other hand, another professor finds it somewhat off-putting since he considers his research group as a close-knit family unit. He feels that the use of FN+nim sounds too business-like and transactional, and it will not promote a congenial atmosphere among fellow students studying under the same advisor.
Another social movement regarding address terms in South Korea involves gender issues. The 2019 Ministry of Gender Equality and Family’s proposal to update traditional family terms arose from a growing awareness of gender inequality, in particular, kinship terms required of married women. Kinship terminology can be classified into three types: relatives on the father’s side (paternal), relatives on the mother’s side (maternal), and relatives by marriage (affinal). Variation and complexity of Korean kinship terminology is also derived from such factors as age, gender, marital status, and class and dialectal differences [51]. The paternal system is far more elaborate than the other two types, where the relative age and marital status of male kin in the paternal system determines appropriate terms for father’s brothers (khun-apeci ‘older uncle,’ cakun-apeci ‘younger uncle (married)’ and samchon ‘younger uncle (unmarried).’ On the other hand, father’s sisters are all called komo ‘paternal aunt.’
The Ministry of Gender Equality and Family recommends a change of the traditional patrilinear hierarchy’s gender-specific family terms, shown in Table 1, to non-sexist egalitarian terms.
The wife is expected to use honorific terms towards the husband’s siblings, while the terms used by the husband for the wife’s siblings are never marked by the honorific suffix -nim. In many surveys a majority of respondents agreed with the need for a change. The National Institute of Korean Language, the highest authority in South Korea on language issues, recommended uniform terms such as ape-nim ‘honored father,’ eme-nim ‘honored mother,’ si-ka ‘husband’s family’ and che-ka ‘wife’s family.’ For the spouse’s younger siblings, the recommendation is either FN+ssi or FN+tongsayng ‘younger sibling,’ which may not gain acceptance because it is not based on real-life usage but some idealized considerations by linguists.
Even prior to these official recommendations, there has been a grassroot movement to remove the prefix oy ‘outside’ when referring to relatives on the maternal side (e.g., oy-halmeni ‘maternal grandmother,’ oy-samchon ‘maternal uncle,’ oy-sonca ‘grandson on the daughter’s side’). For more than two decades, people have been dropping the discriminatory oy ‘outside (of your true family)’ in a conscious effort to achieve gender equality. In certain cases, geononymy, the practice of qualifying kinship terms with place names, was employed for disambiguation (e.g., Seoul halmeni ‘Seoul Grandmother,’ Pusan halmeni ‘Pusan Grandmother’). Another egalitarian language practice is the recent adoption of sensayng-nim ‘honored teacher’ to all suspects regardless of age, gender, and social status in police interrogation. The once-default term, Name+ssi, cannot be used any longer without giving offense, and pseudo-family terms (e.g., acumma ‘auntie’ and acessi ‘uncle’) used until recently by police are not appropriate in a public setting due to their gender-discriminatory meanings.
Across languages, gendered terms typically indicate the speaker’s affective stance and highlight inequality between the interlocutors. Depending on the gender of the speaker, different sibling terms are used in Korea, as in Table 2, which leads to cross-adoption of gendered sibling terms.
In the 1980s, female college students adopted the male term hyeng (‘older brother of a male’), instead of the Full Name+ssi that had been the norm. Kim [52] analyzes this cross-gender usage as a case of “symbolic privilege” [37], whereby politically active female students adopted the masculine term used by highly respected male activists. In the 1990s’ depoliticized campus, female students abandoned gender switching and adopted the expected oppa (‘older brother of a female’). Kim [49] lists other cases of performing gender in Korean. A feminine quality of aykyo ‘acting cute’ is displayed in computer-mediated communication by “adding nasal sounds, elongating syllables, and inserting animated emoticons” (p. 700).
We have demonstrated how language ideology has shifted from a formal hierarchy to egalitarian solidarity due to rapid westernization, democratization, and globalization in South Korea since the division of the peninsula. In addition, the traditional dichotomy between formal, hierarchical, and professional language of men in the workplace and informal, more egalitarian, and private language of women at home have been reinterpreted as women joined the workforce en masse. The use of honorifics still depends on social hierarchy and the formality of the setting, but a multiplicity of social meanings is generated by social interaction and identities of interlocutors as well as the discourse context at hand [53]. There is specific interactional motivation behind the pragmatic selection of each linguistic form from the multi-layered inventory, revealing how the speaker indexes agency and intentionality regarding intimacy, equality, and many other language ideologies in an unfolding discourse.
Conclusion
The comparison between South and North Korea demonstrates diverging and converging practices in these two societies that have had minimal contact since the Korean War (1950-1953). It also shows what kind of linguistic creativity and freedom individuals exercise despite the prescriptive forces imposed by state ideologies on the one hand and commercial pressures on the other. We have shown here how the notion of honorifics is expressed through the well-developed system of address in Korean. The choice of one particular form over other available forms is governed not only by the broad Power and Solidarity semantics prescribed by sociolinguistic factors but also personally indexed meanings both in speech levels and terms of address. Pragmatic variation in meaning making reveals how individual choices establish one’s own positions vis-à-vis larger social norms.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by Yonsei Business Research Institute.
References
- Sohn Ho-min (1999) The Korean Language. The Cambridge Language Surveys.
- Kuno Susumu (1987) Honorific marking in Japanese and the word formation hypothesis of causatives and passives. Studies in Language 11(1): 99-128.
- Strauss Susan, Eun Jong-oh (2005) Indexicality and honorific speech level choice in Korean. Linguistics 43(3): 611-651.
- Yoon Sangseok (2015) Korean Honorifics beyond Politeness Markers: Change of Footing through Shifting of Speech Style. In M Terkourafi (), Interdisciplinary Approaches to Im/politeness. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
- Brown Roger, Gilman Albert (1960) The pronoun of power and solidarity. In Thomas A. Sebeok (Ed.), Styles in Language Technology Press pp. 253-276.
- Brown Lucien (2011) Korean honorifics and ‘revealed,’ ‘ignored,’ and ‘suppressed,’ aspects of Korean culture and politeness. Politeness Across Cultures 106-127.
- Cho Y, Jo J (2023) Linguistic politeness in Korean: Speech levels and terms of address. In C Shei & S Li (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Asian Linguistics, Routledge pp. 339-355.
- Wierzbicka Anna (2003) Cross-cultural pragmatics: The Semantics of Human Interaction. Mouton de Gruyter, Germany.
- Clyne Michael (2009) Address in intercultural communication across languages. Intercultural Pragmatics 6: 395-409.
- Helmbrecht Johannes (2013) Politeness distinctions in pronouns. In Matthew S. Dryer & Martin Haspelmath (Eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
- Pak Talsŏng (1920) Uliuy haengbokkwa ch’aekimul nonhayasso: Cheongnon tongmuege koham [Discussion on our happiness and responsibility: Address to young friends]. Sŏ No. 4.
- Yoon Jae-Hak (2021) Semantic inflation and pronoun avoidance. Language Res 38(3): 469-490.
- Yoon Sangseok (2010) Situational meanings and functions of Korean speech styles [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University of Hawai'i, US.
- Lee Kiri, Cho, Young-mee Yu (2013) Beyond ‘power and solidarity’: Indexing Intimacy in Korean and Japanese terms of address. Korean Linguistics 15: 73-100.
- Lee Kiri, Cho Young-mee Yu (2015) Social meanings of honorific/non-honorific alternations in Korean and Japanese. Korean Linguistics 17: 207-241.
- Morford Janet (1997) Social indexicality in French pronominal address. J Linguistic Anthropology 7(1): 3-37.
- Lyons John (1977) Semantics. Cambridge University Press, UK.
- Silverstein Michael (2003) Indexical order and the dialects of sociolinguistic life. Language and Communication 22: 193-229.
- Ocks Elinor (1992) Indexing gender. In Duranti A & Goodwin C (Eds.), Rethinking Context. Cambridge University Press. pp. 335-358.
- Kim JB, Sells Peter (2007) Korean honorification: a kind of expressive meaning. J East Asian Linguistics 16: 303-336.
- Brown Lucien (2015) Revisiting “polite” -yo and “deferential” -supnita speech style shifting in Korean from the viewpoint of indexicality. J Pragmatics 79: 43-59.
- Hijirida Kyoko, Sohn Ho-min (1983) Commonality and relativity in address-reference term usages. Lang Res 19(2): 139-68.
- Sohn Ho-min (2006) The Korean Language in Culture and Society. University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu, US.
- Seth Michael (2016) A Concise History of Modern Korea. Rowman and Littlefield, US.
- Clyne Michael (1992) Pluricentric Languages. Mouton de Gruyter, Germany.
- King Ross (1996) Language, politics, and ideology in the post-war Koreas. In DR McCann (ed.), Korea Briefing. Asia Society pp. 109-144.
- Cho Y, Chun H, Yun Y (2019) Tongmu and oppa: Terms of address in pluricentric Korean [Paper presentation]. Language, Nations, and Cultures: Pluricentric Languages in Context(s) Conference, Stockholm University, Swedan.
- Ryang Sonia (2021) Language and Truth in North Korea. University of Hawaii Press, US.
- Yang S (2015) Study on address and reference terms used in social life of North Korea. Hangeul 310: 287-313.
- Yu Youngnan (1991) My names. Arirang, Winter, p. 28-30.
- Lee J (2012) Oppa, Al Kachyŏ-wassŏ? [“Oppa, did you bring Al?”] The Unified Korea 344: 34-35.
- Urimal Yechŏlbŏb [Language Etiquette] (2010) Pyŏngyang, North Korea.
- Lakoff Robin (1975) Language and Women’s Place. Harper & Row, New York, US.
- Bucholtz M, Hall K (2005) Identity in interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies 7: 585-614.
- Jenkin R(2004) Social Identity. Routledge, London, UK.
- Lav J, Wenger E (1991) Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press.
- Eckert P, McConnell-Ginet S (1992) Think practically and look locally: language and gender as community-based practice. In BJ Siegel, AR Beals, SA Tyler (Eds.), Annual Rev Anthropology 21: 461-490.
- Cho Tae-Rin (2020) Tayhak kyoswukan hochinge sahyong pyenie tayhan cilcek yenkwu [A qualitative study on address term usage among university faculty]. Hangeul 81(1): 115-147.
- Brown Lucien (2013b) “Oppa, hold my purse”: A sociocultural study of identity and indexicality in the perception and use of oppa ‘older brother’ by second language learners. The Korean Language in America 18: 1-22.
- Hong M (2017) A contrastive study on address form of acquaintance between Korean and Japanese. J Foreign Studies 40: 103-122.
- The National Institute of Korean Language (2011) Pyocwun Ene Yechel [The Standard Language Etiquette].
- Kang H (2002) A sociolinguistic analysis of the usage of terms of address used in the service industry. The Sociolinguistic J Korea 10(1): 1-24.
- Na Y, Lee P, Lim Y, Kim T, Park D, et al. (2017) A Survey on Contemporary Use of Language for Social Communication. The National Institute of Korean Language.
- Kim T, Lee P (2018) A study on the contemporary use of address terms and reference terms in official and social communication. J Korean Language & Literature Education 66: 31-68.
- Kim M (2016) Moderating effect of address terms for service provider used by customers on relational benefits and satisfaction. J Hotel and Culture 15(3): 130-143.
- Kim HJ, Kim H, Lee J, Kawano Y (2015) The various usage of the terms of address on relatives in views of sociolinguistics. The Language and Culture 11(3): 117-146.
- Pinker Steven (2003) The Blank Slate. Penguin Books, London, UK.
- Schulz M (1975) The semantic derogation of women. In B. Thorne & N. Henley (Eds.), Language and Sex, Newbury, p. 64-75.
- Kim Minju (2022) Performing gender in Korean: language, gender, and social change. In Sungdae Cho & John Whitman (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Korean Linguistics. Cambridge University Press, UK.
- Koh Haejin (2002) A cross-cultural study of address terms in Korean and English [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University of Hawai'i, UK.
- King Ross (2006) Korean kinship terminology. Korean Language in Culture and Society. University of Hawaii Press pp. 101-117.
- Kim Minju (1999) Cross-Adaptation of language between different genders: the case of Korean kinship terms Hyeng and Enni. In S. Wertheim, Baily A, & Corston-Oliver M (Eds.), Engendering Communication. Berkeley Women and Language Group, pp. 271-283.
- Kim Seoung-nam (2006) Personal pronoun of Modern Korean. Study of History of the Korean Language 6: 77-100.