Chapter 24 - Performing Gender in Korean: Language, Gender, and Social Change

Summary

Chapter 24 examines the topic of language and gender in the context of Korean studies. Korean is well-known for its highly sophisticated honorifics and other resources that index hierarchy, formality, personal closeness, etc. Korean speakers “perform” gender using politeness distinctions as a primary resource. Studying how gender is performed requires the examination of language and gender in local contexts as they are indexed and constructed. This chapter also looks at the relative frequency of men’s use of formal language such as caney “you”, yey “yes”, and the supnita style, in comparison to women. The result of this is that women may feel like “interlopers” in prestigious professions where formal language is the norm. On the other hand, as Korea is rapidly moving away from a hierarchical society and toward a more egalitarian one, informal language, including caki “you”, ney “yes”, the eyo style, and other patterns associated with women, is becoming preferred over formal language to some extent across genders. This is especially evident among the younger generation.

24.1 Introduction

The publication of Lakoff’s (1975) Language and Women’s Place ushered in the first wave of research problematizing gender inequality in linguistic representations (e.g., Man Made Language, Spender 1985) and conversational practices. Subsequently, with further development of theoretical frameworks and methodologies, the interdisciplinary field of Language and Gender emerged, incorporating elements of socio-linguistics, linguistic anthropology, gender studies, ethnographic studies, and communication studies, among others.

The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, I will briefly outline the history and theoretical frameworks used in the field of Language and Gender. This field began under strong influences of Labovian socio-linguistics, which propose that social variations of speakers (e.g., socioeconomic status and age) are reflected as linguistic variations. Thus, in order to find correlations between gender and language, studies have often reduced speakers and their linguistic variations only to gendered speakers and gendered languages. However, in actual communicative interactions, speaker identities and the social meanings of language are diverse and fluid, changing moment by moment in emerging conversations. New approaches avoid abstracting gender and language from their social and discourse contexts and have moved towards studying them in their full complexity, as indexed, constructed, and negotiated in local contexts.

Second, I will survey key research topics concerning Korean language, society, and gender to demonstrate how the theoretical frameworks of this field have been applied in the Korean context. Anglo-American studies have led the field, yet the findings of these studies cannot be directly transposed onto the Korean context. Moreover, some linguistic features are uniquely crucial to the Korean language, including a highly sophisticated honorific system and various ways of addressing interlocutors. These features are among the clearest linguistic indices that Korean speakers utilize to construct their identities, their relationships with interlocutors, and the discourse dynamics in ongoing conversations. As such, they comprise the main parts of this chapter.

The study of language and gender has brought profound changes to the English-speaking world, including s/he or they replacing the generic he, Ms. replacing Miss and Mrs., and spokesperson replacing spokesman. In spite of a similar potential for positive social influence, studies on Korean language and gender have remained sparse. Furthermore, as Jeon (2006: 57) and Hee Kang (2011: 3) have pointed out, some studies have simply transposed findings from Anglo-American studies to Korean language and society and have made claims without any supporting evidence (e.g., men using imperatives while women use suggestives for making requests, S. Kim 1991; S. Lee and Kim 1992: 41–3). Ensuing studies quote untested earlier claims, and the repetition of such practices transform claims into a Foucauldian notion of “knowledge” (Foucault 1972). Such problematic building of knowledge based solely on gender stereotypes simply adds fuel to the reproduction and reification of existing gender expectations.

In this study, I survey studies that draw on empirical data. Based on this body of research, I conclude that i) as in other languages, Korean speakers “perform gender” (Butler 1988) utilizing various linguistic resources, and that ii) as Korean society becomes more egalitarian and less hierarchical, the effects of such change are also palpable in Korean language use.

The chapter is organized as follows: Section 24.2 reviews the theoretical frameworks; Section 24.3 investigates honorific and non-honorific Korean sentence enders and reply tokens; Section 24.4 discusses address terms and personal pronouns; Section 24.5 examines communicative strategies and regional dialects; and Section 24.6 presents the conclusions.

24.2 Development of Theoretical Frameworks

24.2.1 Two Competing Approaches: Dominance and Difference

From the 1970s through the 1990s, studies on language and gender mostly evolved around two competing frameworks of dominance and difference (Cameron 1990; Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992; Talbot 2010).

24.2.1.1 The Dominance Approach

The first generation of researchers in this field developed the Dominance Approach (e.g., Fisherman 1983; Lakoff 1975; West and Zimmerman 1983). They ascribe different linguistic behaviors between genders as the realization of power inequality in society. This approach holds that women’s delicate, polite, and sometimes timorous speech style is a reflection of their subordinate status. Such style is not inherent to women, but a socially constructed outcome – a woman’s way of interacting and negotiating with dominant men. Furthermore, these researchers argue that since women use soft language, they are often not taken seriously and thus marginalized in mixed-sex conversations and in professional settings.

Scholars critical of the dominance approach argue that it essentially solidifies male hierarchical norms by evaluating women’s speech negatively as weak and powerless.

24.2.1.2 The Difference Approach

The difference approach ascribes divergent linguistic behaviors of men and women to the different subcultures of men and women and to their early socialization in the peer groups. Maltz and Borker (1982) apply Gumperz’s (1982) notion of cross-cultural miscommunication to an analysis of gender miscommunication and gender differences in conversational practices. They reinterpret women’s language in a more positive way. In contrast to men’s more hierarchical and assertive languages, women’s language is cooperative and supportive. Citing Goodwin’s (1990) ethnographic study of African-American children at play, they argue that women and men develop different norms for conversations, and these norms are learned in same-sex peer groups during childhood. For instance, boys form large, hierarchically organized gangs whereas girls form small groups of close friends. As a result, boys learn a more assertive and competitive language while girls learn a more supportive and attentive language.

Expanding this approach, Deborah Tannen wrote a series of bestsellers including You Just Don’t Understand (1991), which received wide acclaim by the general public as a resource to help decode the opposite gender’s speech. Table 24.1 summarizes Tannen’s description of the two genders’ conversational styles.

Table 24.1 A dichotomy of conversational styles

Women’s Style	Men’s Style
Sympathy	Problem-solving
Rapport	Report
Listening	Lecturing
Private	Public
Connection	Status
Supportive	Oppositional
Intimacy	Independence

(Talbot 2010: 92)

As appealing as this dichotomy may be, many feminist linguists (e.g., Freed 1992) have problematized the difference approach since it ignores the power differences between genders and obscures the dominating agents. When the focus of the problem shifts to mutual misunderstanding, both men and women become equally responsible for their miscommunication.

24.2.2 Problems in Earlier Studies

As Talbot (2010) puts it, Lakoff’s publication “set the ball rolling” (41), and ensuing studies in the field were successful in raising public awareness of the linguistic gender inequality. However, early research focused narrowly on finding gender differences in linguistic behaviors and producing one-on-one matches between a linguistic feature and a gendered meaning. Such simplistic approaches failed to consider critical variables other than gender, revealing serious problems.

The case of interruption can serve as an illustrative example. Men were believed to interrupt women more than vice versa to exercise their power (e.g., West and Zimmerman 1983). James and Clarke (1993), however, examine over thirty studies on interruptions, and reveal that the findings of these studies are inconsistent and even contradict one another, although all are conducted in the US and Great Britain. They point out that not all interruptions are “dominance-related,” as close friends can co-construct a turn and create “cooperative interruption” when excited in talk, for instance (e.g., Coates 1989). Even when interruptions are initiated to exercise power, successful and unsuccessful interruptions have different significance in terms of power relations. These factors, along with others, such as age, status, setting, and the topic of conversation itself, ought to have been considered and controlled to produce reliable results.

24.2.3 A New Turn in Theoretical Orientation

The developing field responded to pointed critiques, as those revealed in the studies of interruption, and sought to hone its analytical apparatus. Starting in the early 1990s, a set of new directions, methodologies, and paradigms were proposed.

24.2.3.1 Multiple Identities as Constructed and Indexed in Discourse

Scholars in language and gender began to move away from matching isolated linguistic forms to one gendered meaning and toward configuring more dynamic, interwoven relations between linguistic forms, the speech acts they perform, the social meanings they index, and the gender identities enacted in situated contexts. Some call this approach “poststructuralist” (e.g., Talbot 2010) while others call it “postmodern” (e.g., Cameron 2005). Regardless of labels, research in the new approach demonstrate similarities in their core orientations. Table 24.2 shows how Cameron (2005) contrasts this new approach with previous ones.

Table 24.2 Comparisons of approaches to language and gender

“Modern” approach	“Postmodern” approach
Difference: two internally homogeneous groups, men and women	Diversity: an array of possible gender identities or positions
Socialization: gender identities and gendered linguistic behaviors are acquired early in life	Performativity: gender is performed in moment-by-moment evolving interactions
Big stories: overarching social structures such as dominance and differences as explanatory tool	Local explanations: narrower coverage with deeper understanding (e.g., community of practice)

(adapted from Cameron 2005: 484)

The first feature, “diversity” (in contrast to “difference”), refers to the fact that what constitutes a feminine or masculine feature differs significantly community by community. Even the category of “women” in the same community can contain a wide range of heterogeneous individuals, defying what may appear to be simple characterizations (e.g., “Korean female high school students in Seoul” is not a homogenous group). In this way, the new approach does not reduce speaker identities to one monolithic gendered identity.

The second feature, “performativity,” is based on the crucial premise that relations between language and gender are indexical and constructive. Unlike the “socialization” model, which postulates that early education prescribes and determines speakers’ feminine or masculine behaviors, the new approach argues that speakers perform or “do gender” (Bergvall et al. 1996; Coates 1996) covertly or overtly, changing their language and personae depending on various factors such as the setting and interlocutors.

While language is a prime resource allowing speakers to “do gender”, the relation between a linguistic form and the social meaning of gender does not show a one-to-one correspondence. In her work “Indexing Gender,” Ochs (1992) argues that the relation of language to gender is mediated and constitutive because “one or more linguistic features may index social meaning (e.g., stances, social acts), which in turn helps to constitute gender meanings” (341). She takes Japanese ze as an example. It “directly indexes” coarse intensity while also “indirectly indexing” male voice (342). Further elaborating on the multi-layered nature of indexing, Silverstein (2003) introduces “indexical order” through which a linguistic form in a given situational context can index multiple social meanings or indexical values such as first-order indexical, second order indexical, … n-th order-indexical.

Scholars of the Korean language are familiar with indexicality and indexical order as recent studies on Korean honorifics have often adopted these concepts (L. Brown 2015; M. Kim and Strauss 2018; Kiri Lee and Cho 2015; Strauss and Eun 2005). Traditionally, the use of honorifics has been explained as being prescribed by hierarchical order, interpersonal distance, and the formality of the setting. Recent studies, however, have shown that during a continuous spate of conversation where the speakers and settings remain the same, speakers still alternate between different honorific forms and even between honorific and non-honorific forms. Appealing to linguistic indexicality, these studies have tried to explain this phenomenon as a form of speakers’ code-switching, that is, indexing multiple and shifting self-identities and their relations with interlocutors in an unfolding discourse.

24.2.3.2 Looking Locally: Community of Practice

The third feature of the new approach shown in Table 24.2 is “local explanation”. This emerged from Eckert and McConnell-Ginet’s (1992) study, “Think Practically and Look Locally”, which applied a “Community of Practice” (Lave and Wenger 1991) approach to the field of language and gender. This ethnographic approach argues that gender, which is a social construct that can differ from community to community, should be examined as it is being constructed and indexed within its local community of practice. A community of practice has been defined as “an aggregate of people who, united by a common enterprise, come to develop and share ways of doing things, ways of talking, beliefs, and values – in short, practices” (Eckert 2006: 183).

This approach was welcomed by researchers in the field of language and gender because it provided a concrete, workable methodology to conduct in-depth research of smaller groups and, hence, avoid the pitfalls of oversimplification. At the same time, it has also received a serious criticism: whether the validity of micro-level ethnographic studies can transcend their particular, local communities and whether this kind of micro-level approach should be the main direction of the field of language and gender (Bergvall 1999: 280; Dubois and Horvath 1999).

In response to this criticism, fifteen years after their original publication, Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (2007) suggest expanding the approach in two directions to achieve generalization at a macro-level: first, a comparative direction, which examines comparable communities of practice to draw generalizations; and second, a relational direction, which places a community of practice in relation to other communities of practice, as well as to social networks, institutions, and global “imagined communities” (Anderson 1983).

Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (2007) cite Ochs and Taylor’s (1992) study, “Father Knows Best” as an example of the first direction. This research examined family dinner table conversations and found that while mothers play the role of facilitator, eliciting children’s narratives, fathers play the role of authoritative evaluator commenting on the narratives. The gender dynamics and gender hierarchy enacted at the American dinner table can be compared with those in different languages to draw more general conclusions about gender relations between couples and the socialization of gender roles at home.

As an example of the second direction, Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (2007) cite Podesva (2004), who examines gay professional men’s change of phonetic and phonological features as they move from the workplace to personal gatherings. These men construct different personae in the two settings as they engage in very different practices. As this example shows, speakers belong to different communities, and following the speakers’ different communities can extend the study directionally to examine what kinds of linguistic resources (e.g., “gay speech” in Podesva) the speakers employ to enact different identities in different communities of practice.

24.3 Honorific and Non-honorific Language Use

24.3.1 Non-honorific Use: Teenagers’ “Doing Gender”

24.3.1.1 Non-honorific Interrogative Enders

Korean sentence enders can index many different social meanings about self, interlocutor(s), and the discourse situation. The first group of sentence enders examined here are the three non-honorific interrogative forms: nya and ni (the plain style interrogative forms) and e (the intimate/informal sentence ender). Nya, ni, and e are all non-honorific forms, and speakers can use any of them in asking a question to an addressee of equal or lower status. S-K. Lee and Kim (1992: 9) and Min (1997: 554) claimed without empirical evidence that between the two variations of the plain style nya and ni, men tend to use nya whereas women use ni since nya is considered rough and aggressive.

Yoo (2004) empirically tests these claims. To replicate actual choices speakers have in real conversations, she includes e as a third variable to nya and ni. Participants are made up of seventy males and fifty-eight females in their teens to thirties. They are asked to fill out speech bubbles for characters in two comic-strips. In one, the character addresses a hearer of the same gender and in the other, the character addresses the opposite gender.

The results show that overall, the most popular interrogative ender is the informal style e (usage rate ranging between 60% and 80%), followed by ni, with the least popular ender being nya. However, two groups, males in their teens and twenties, show exceptions to this pattern. When teenage boys talk to their male peers, they use nya most frequently – as much as 70%. On the other hand, when they talk to female peers, they switch to e or ni, and the use of nya drops to 15%. When men in their twenties talk to male peers, they also use nya frequently (20%). Table 24.3 charts the frequency of nya.

Table 24.3 Distribution of non-honorific interrogative nya

Speakers	Ender	M to M		M to F		F to M		F to F
		N	%	N	%	N	%	N	%
10s	nya	14	70	3	15	2	9	4	18
20s	nya	5	20	4	16	2	10	1	5
30s	nya	2	10	2	10	2	11	2	11

(adapted from Yoo 2004: 25)

Subsequently, Yoo conducted a survey of college students examining how they would feel if they are asked a question marked with nya, ni, and e. The result shows that nya carries a negative connotation, unlike e and ni; 32% of the students respond that nya sounds “hierarchical” and “coercive”. Yoo concludes that nya sounds blunt and rough, and teenage boys use nya because they talk without much consideration for others’ feelings, similar to the way they freely use swear words.

I would suggest a different analysis. Table 24.3 clearly demonstrates the existence of a teen male subculture, which fades as the teenagers grow older. Here, Korean teenage boys may “do masculinity” and “do their age”; they claim masculinity in male-to-male interactions by using nya, sounding rough and blunt. They sense the roughness of nya and hence, code-switch when talking to their female peers. As they grow older and expand their interactions with people outside of their peer group, their use of nya decreases.

Lastly, contrary to what S-K. Lee and Kim (1992) and Min (1997: 554) have claimed, men as a group do not use nya more across age groups. In fact, female teenagers also use nya quite frequently when talking to female peers (18%), although the percentage drops to 9% when they talk to male peers. When talking to female peers, some girls may want to come across as “less feminine” and “strong”. As such, they seem to “do their gender” and “do their age” on their own terms; they also use nya less as they grow older.

24.3.1.2 Non-Honorific Reply Tokens e and ung “Yeah”

Yoo (2004) compares the usage rate of e and ung, which are non-honorific reply tokens to summons, translatable as “yeah”, and used when the caller is of equal or inferior status. The results indicate that men use e more while women tend to use ung. Unlike e, ung carries a soft, friendly feeling due to its nasal sound.

Again, teenage boys use e most frequently among themselves (81%) but use it less when talking to teenage girls (67%). Its second most frequent users are men in their twenties when they talk to other men (60%). When talking to women, they also use it less (52%). Similarly, teenage girls use the softer ung form more frequently when they respond to male peers’ calls (79%) than to female peers’ (58%). The findings of this survey corroborate the survey on the use of nya and ni. Both teenage boys and girls seem to “do gender” and “do age” using e and ung.

24.3.2 Honorific Use: Formality and Gender

24.3.2.1 Honorific Sentence Enders Eyo and Supnita

In Korean, both eyo and supnita are honorific speech enders, used when speaking to a person of higher status or of an equal status but non-intimate relation. Traditionally, scholars explained the difference between eyo and supnita using three factors: deference, formality, and gender. Supnita signals higher levels of deference and formality than eyo and hence is used in institutional and formal settings such as news broadcasts, official presentations, and the military. Eyo, on the other hand, is considered to be polite but less deferential and less formal (Lee and Ramsey 2000; Lukoff 1982; Sohn 1994, 1999). Between the two forms, studies also report that men tend to use the deferential ender supnita more often, whereas women make greater use of the polite ender eyo (S-K. Lee and Kim 1992: 42; Min 1995, 1997; Sohn 1994: 10). This division implicates the binary pairing of men with formality and women with informality, and resembles what Tannen describes in Table 24.1.

The first study attempting to empirically examine this claim is Min (1997), which examines two episodes of a reality TV show Cheyhem Salm-uy Hyencang (“Experience of Life Site”, KBS). His findings in Table 24.4 confirm previous studies’ claims.

Table 24.4 Distribution of eyo and supnita

Speaker	Age	eyo (# of tokens)	supnita (# of tokens)	Length
Male Presenter	50s	45 (54%)	39 (46%)	2 hours
Female Presenter	30s	77 (80%)	19 (20%)	2 hours

(Min 1997: 550)

Recently, Brown (2015) also examined one episode of a similar talk show Mwues-itun Mwule Poseyyo (“Ask Whatever You Want”, KBS). Brown concludes that gender does not play a role in determining the use of two forms, contradicting Min’s findings. Table 24.5 shows his results.

Table 24.5 Distribution of eyo and supnita

Speaker	Age	eyo	supnita	Other	Total	Length
Male Presenter	30s	73 (61.9%)	28 (23.5%)	17 (14.4%)	118 (100%)	1 hour
Female Presenter	30s	59 (65.5%)	22 (24.4%)	9 (10%)	90 (100%)	1 hour

(Brown 2015: 50)

Although having utilized empirical data, the above two studies analyze only one or two hours of discourse. H-S. Kang (2011) investigates this question using a statistical analysis of a large corpus consisting of scripts from eight movies and three drama series and concludes that gender is a strong factor in the use of the two forms. In his data, the usage ratio between supnita and eyo for men is 16.1% vs. 83.9% whereas the ratio for women is 6.3% vs. 93.7%. Although both genders generally use eyo form more frequently, women use it even more so than men. H-S. Kang identifies speaker’s gender, rituality of utterance, formality of situation, and sentence type as four strong constraints in the choice between the two forms. That is, males, in formal settings, uttering a statement (not other sentence types), especially of a ritual expression type (e.g., “thank you” and “sorry”), are more likely to use supnita than eyo. H-S. Kang (2011) also concludes that as the speaker’s age becomes younger, and the setting becomes more formal, gender difference is reduced (12). It is well known that younger generations are using supnita less frequently (e.g., H. Kim 1991) while in a formal setting, its use is more or less a requirement. Given this, the older age of the male presenter in Min’s study may explain his more frequent use of supnita, whereas the formality of the discourse setting may explain the lack of gender difference in Brown’s data.

Recently, H-S. Kang and Kim (2018) conducted a follow-up study; they examine the use of supnita and eyo in computer-mediated communication using the same statistical methodology. They analyze eight KakaoTalk chat rooms with 117 participants in their twenties to sixties. The result of their analysis mostly corroborates H-S. Kang’s (2011) findings: sentence type, speaker’s gender, rituality of utterance, and formality of the situation are constraints that influence the choice between the two forms.

Strauss and Eun (2005) examine this question with a qualitative approach. They investigate naturally occurring spoken discourse data with a focus on the alternation between the two forms when the speakers and settings remain the same. Although without statistical analysis, they propose that “gender in and of itself does not appear to be a primary predictive factor” (639). They instead argue that the choice between two forms is motivated by an indexing of three layers of meanings (+ for supnita vs. – for eyo): first-order indexicality of +/– deference, second-order of +/– boundary, and third-order of +/– exclusion.

I examine this question using a more controlled set of conversation corpus. My dataset is the Linguistic Data Consortium Corpus, comprised of 100 telephone conversations between friends and family, with each conversation lasting approximately twenty to thirty minutes. Two of the core variables, personal closeness and setting, are controlled in the data. The speakers are close enough to talk for at least twenty minutes, and the conversations are informal and private.

In the data, only twenty tokens of supnita are found (excluding those used in quoting others’ speech and a mother’s jocular use to her son). Given the size of the corpus, this is quite a low frequency, demonstrating that Korean speakers rarely use the more formal supnita form in private conversations. Also contributing to the low frequency is the fact that many of the speakers were in their twenties and thirties; younger people use this form less.

Out of the twenty, only one token is produced by a female speaker (talking to an older female friend) while the remaining nineteen are produced by five male speakers in their thirties and forties talking to a close older man. Also, out of twenty tokens, five are rather formulaic expressions such as kamsahapnita “thank you”, mianhapnita “sorry”, and cohsupnita “it’s good (used in agreeing with the interlocutor)”. Contrary to what H-S. Kang (2011) and H-S. Kang and Kim (2018) argue, the sentence type of statement is not a factor: out of twenty tokens, eight are interrogative type. In conclusion, the result demonstrates that women use supnita less than men, especially in informal settings where speakers can freely choose between eyo and supnita.

In ever-evolving conversations, speakers can seamlessly shift between eyo and supnita to index various social meanings. From a closer look, it may appear that gender is not a factor as Strauss and Eun (2005) and Brown (2015) report. Nevertheless, there is a clear tendency for female speakers to use eyo form more frequently than supnita, especially in casual conversations.

24.3.2.2 Honorific Reply Tokens Ney and Yey “Yes”

Korean has two honorific reply tokens “yes”, ney and yey. S-K. Lee and Kim (1992) and Min (1997) claim without empirical evidence that Korean women opt to use ney and men tend towards yey, arguing that ney sounds softer with a nasal [n] and yey sounds formal. This contrast is similar to that of non-honorific reply tokens ung and e (with or without a nasal sound).

H-S. Kim (2009) tests this claim. She examined the responses of 570 college students in nineteen classes during roll call in 2002, 2005, 2007, and 2008. She concludes that female students use ney predominantly but the difference between genders has reduced over time. Female students’ use of ney stayed in the ranges between 95% and 98%, whereas male students’ use of ney has increased each time: 9% > 21% > 39% > 44%.

H-S. Kang and Kim (2017) also explore this question using instant messenger KakaoTalk chat rooms where speakers in their twenties to sixties participated. Their findings confirm H-S. Kim’s argument that gender is the most important constraint. Men use ney 75% of the time while women use it 96%. Their study also revealed that younger people use ney more than older people.

Section 24.3.2.2 has demonstrated that the sentence enders eyo and ney “yes” are more popular among women and also among young people. This indicates that younger males have started to adopt less formal, more egalitarian, and more friendly linguistic traits (which are closely associated with female traits) in their language. This will be further elaborated later in the chapter.

24.3.3 Computer-Mediated Communication

In texting, people take more liberties to ignore orthography and write words as they sound in order to effectively deliver their affective stance since they cannot express it in person. H-S. Kang and Kim (2017, 2018) investigate KakaoTalk chatroom data and report that women tend to add nasal sounds and elongate the last syllables more than men. In the use of sentence enders eyo and supnita, women add a nasal sound (e.g., eyong, eyom, eyeng, supnitang) and elongate the last syllable (e.g., supnita-a-a and supnita-ang, eyo-o) more frequently than men (79% vs. 21%). Women also add nasal sounds and elongate the last syllable, as in neyng, neym, ney-ey instead of ney “yes”, more frequently than men.

Hur (2017) examines KakaoTalk text messages of college students. Similar to H-S. Kang and Kim’s studies, she also observes that students occasionally add the nasal sound “o [ng]” to the end of words to make their utterance sound “more lively and softer” (184), and this, again, is more frequently observed in females (122 tokens) than in males (ninety-six tokens). Interestingly, however, male and female students equally use this when texting their boy-/girlfriends (fifty-four tokens each). Both genders seem to be aware of the effect of “o [ng]”, but female students seem to extend this use more widely to their friends than male students.

Hur (2017) also analyzes their use of emoticons and other signs which speakers use to convey their affect. Take (1) for example.

1. (1)

   chenyenmwul….	cokpo.. ^^	pwuthaktuli-lkey-yong ~~
   rare.treasure	genealogy (previous tests)	ask.favor-FUT-POL
   “The rare treasure… genealogy… could you please~”		(Hur 2017: 175)

The … sign visualizes a long pause or a trail-off of an utterance; it can, hence, signify hesitation. The ~ sign indicates the elongation of the sound. Female speakers more frequently use … (forty-five vs. thirty-eight tokens) and ~ (forty vs. thirty-two tokens) than male speakers. Female speakers also use more emoticons (thirty-six vs. twenty-two tokens) and combined-sign emoticons such as ^^ *^^* >.< ^.~ (thirty-five vs. thirteen tokens).

These findings indicate that women exert a more concerted effort to communicate their affective stance and make their texts more animated for their interlocutors. Also, in Korea, aykyo “acting cute” is considered a feminine quality. In performing gender, adding nasal sounds, elongating last syllables, and inserting animated emoticons are linguistic resources to enact this cuteness and to index Korean femininity.

24.3.4 Women in Formal Settings

Discussions thus far have demonstrated that there exists distributional skewing which can further foster the traditional dichotomy pairing of formal, hierarchical, stronger, and professional language with men (indexed by linguistic resources such as supnita, yey) and informal, egalitarian, softer, and private language with women (indexed by eyo, ney). Women as wives and mothers are perceived and expected to use a more supportive and softer conversational style and as a lover, a cuter (aykyo) style. When women move to professional settings, however, they must bridge an even greater gap than their male counterparts in their use of formal, hierarchical, and assertive language.

Since more men work in institutional settings and workplaces, they are more familiar with, and thus more frequently employ, formal, hierarchical, and even assertive language. In the socialization process as well, they model their talk after their fathers and father figures. What enhances this further is Korea’s conscription policy. Korean men are required to serve in the military for twenty-one to twenty-four months in their early twenties, during which they are intensely trained to speak an extremely formal and hierarchical style of language. For example, men in the military are only allowed to use the formal ender supnita and the honorific reply token yey “yes” in all formal settings, to those of higher ranks or older ages. It is this formal speech style that is also used in professional settings. Eckert (1998: 67) points out that women in professional settings often feel as if they are “interlopers”. Korean women may feel this way even more so.

In this situation, some female superiors at professional settings may employ even more “stereotypical” male traits. Shin (2003) analyzes two TV drama series and examines female and male superiors’ speech acts of requests. She concludes that in workplaces, female superiors use fewer polite directives than male superiors and they “modify and defeminize their speech in order to enact their authority as powerful figures” (25). Similarly, M. Kim (2015) shows a female professor’s use of the male term caney “you” to reinforce her authority in the traditionally male field of engineering.

The Korean language is known for its highly developed honorific system which can mark fine-grained levels of deference, formality, and hierarchy. Korean women may have to undergo more serious adjustments to traverse private and professional personae.

24.4 Korean Address Terms: Naming Gender

Across different languages, inequalities in the linguistic representations of the two genders are common, as these terms are linguistic heritages of old traditions. For instance, in Korea, a wife often refers to her husband as pakkathyangban “husband” (pakkath “outside” yangpan “nobleman”), whereas a husband refers to his wife as cipsalam “wife” (cip “house” salam “person”) or ansalam “wife” (an “inside” salam “person”). Gendered terms are still emerging, transforming, or disappearing today. Here, I discuss three cases illustrating the dynamic relations between terms for gender and gender images currently being played out in Korean.

24.4.1 Female College Students’ Adoption and Discard of the Male Term Hyeng

In Korea, different terms are used with older siblings depending on the speaker’s gender: oppa “older brother” and enni “older sister” are used by younger females and hyeng “older brother” and nwuna “older sister” by younger males. Due to Confucian traditions, these kinship terms are widely used beyond family members and are extended to older friends at school. In the 1980s, Korean female college students started using hyeng “older brother”, a male’s word, instead of oppa, the default for a female, to address older male students. According to O. Lee’s (1984) survey, in 1984, the usage rate of hyeng to oppa among female students at co-ed colleges was 88:11. Currently, this is not the case, and female students have reverted to using oppa instead of hyeng.

M. Kim (1999) explains this phenomenon using the concept of “symbolic privilege” (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992). The university campus in the 1980s was at the peak of a violent student movement against a military dictatorship (Rhee 1993). Due to the militant and often violent nature of the student demonstrations, compounded by the fact that the majority of participating students were male, the culture on campus was dominantly “masculine” in the 1980s. Student activists were highly respected among fellow students for their political conviction and sacrifice, such that they possessed the most salient “symbolic privilege”. Female students were also generally more politicized and less feminine. In this ensuing circumstance, oppa was avoided since it evoked a sense of femininity and “cuteness”, and particularly since it was used by younger women to address older men. Some propose that hyeng as then used is an abbreviated term of hakhyeng “school friend (honorific)”. Even if this is the case, the shift we examine remains the same: only female students shifted from using oppa to hyeng.

After Korea became a democratic society and college campuses became de-politicized in the 1990s, female college students discarded hyeng and reverted to the female term, oppa. The changes in the Korean female college students’ adoption and discard of hyeng over the two decades illustrate how speakers use linguistic resources to “do gender” in accordance with local culture and prestigious gender images.

24.4.2 Ongoing Sexualization of Akassi “Young Woman”

Schulz (1975) pointed out that compared to words for men, words for women obtain sexual meaning more easily (e.g., master vs. mistress). For example, whore was originally a polite term for “a lover of either sex” but became “a female lover” and eventually took on the meaning of “prostitute”. More examples are given in (2).

1. (2) Korean kannahuy “a young woman” in fifteenth century => “a prostitute” in nineteenth century => obsolete; Portuguese, ramariga “a young woman” => “a prostitute”; Spanish, muerzuela “a young woman” > “a prostitute”; French garce “a girl” > “a loose woman”; Chinese xiǎo jiě “young woman” > “woman in sex service” (M. Kim 2008: 149).

Currently, in Korean the word akassi “a young woman” is also undergoing sexualization as it can denote a “woman in the sex trade”. For instance, in the title of a news article in (3), “Kangnam (a new town of Seoul) akassi” means a woman working in the sex industry in Kangnam.

1. (3)

   “Kangnam akassi”	noli-n	koli	tech.
   Kangnam akassi	aim-REL	high interest	trap.
   “Trap of high interest rates aimed at ‘Kangnam akassi’”

(Kyenghyang Daily April 29, 2008; cited in M. Kim 2008: 158)

Trying to find the underlying mechanisms for this tendency of sexualization, McConnell-Ginet (1980: 6) observes:

[this tendency] is somehow connected to widespread misogyny and views that women are mainly sexual beings. What is not clear are the mechanisms through which such sentiments lead to linguistic changes of this kind. How can linguistic meaning be changed because of people’s background assumptions, knowledge, experience, and the like?

In other words, she suggests sexist attitudes as the driving force for the semantic change, although she acknowledges that the linguistic mechanism underlying these changes is unknown.

M. Kim (2008) examines the ongoing change of akassi “a young woman” with corpus data and demonstrates a very different mechanism for its sexualization.¹ In the data, 37% (216 out of 583 tokens) of akassi tokens refer to women in sex-related professions. Analysis demonstrates that Korean speakers, aware of the shame and stigma attached to sex-related professions, avoid using direct and hence disparaging terms for the profession and instead use the general term akassi as a euphemistic evasion to address and refer to these women. Often, another referent such as swulcip “bar” or lwum salong “room salon” (common locations for the profession in Korea) are introduced before akassi. The subsequent use of akassi is then easily interpreted as women working in the mentioned location. In sum, rather than an abstract sexist attitude, it is a euphemistic evasion (which is again necessitated due to the kind of service that women perform) that leads speakers to adopt a neutral term such as akassi in addressing and referring to women in sex service. In spite of these good intentions, when this social practice is processed as a linguistic mechanism, the eventual outcome is the sexualization of the female term akassi.

24.4.3 Men at Work and Women at Home

In Korea, when addressing a male adult whom the speaker does not know, respected job titles with the honorific nim (e.g., sacang-nim “company president” or sensayng-nim “teacher”) are adopted regardless of the male addressee’s actual job (Kang 2002: 6–8; Sohn 1999: 208). Similarly, kinship terms such as emeni “mother” or enni “older sister” are employed to politely address female adults (H. Kang 2002: 6–8). For instance, in the 2014 TV drama series, An Incomplete Life (Misayng, episode fifteen), the male protagonist, who is selling socks to subway passengers, addresses middle-aged males as sacang-nim “company president” (three times) while addressing middle-aged females as emeni “mother” (two times) and acwumeni “aunt”, “married woman” (two times). The use of kinship terms when addressing adult women may have something to do with the fact that women traditionally have not held jobs outside of the house. However, this type of usage contributes to the perpetuation of fixed gender roles.

With the sexualization of akassi “a young woman”, Korean speakers began to use enni “older sister” (a term female speakers use and not nwuna “older sister” which male speakers use) as a general term to address young women regardless of speakers’ actual age and gender (M. Kim 2008). Similarly, an older woman who works as a waitress is called imo “aunt on the mother’s side” (not komo “aunt on the father’s side”). To some extent, the use of kinship terms is motivated by the intention to be friendly. Regardless of the good intention however, these terms which are originally used to address female seniors in the family now have become widely used to address servers in commercial settings. As a result, these female terms face depreciation of their symbolic value, unlike their male counterparts. H. Kang (2002) and S-K. Lee and Kim (1992: 56) have attested to this. According to their surveys, female customers do not want to be addressed with these types of kinship terms by employees at stores and restaurants. Rather, they prefer to be addressed with a more formal term kokayk-nim or son-nim (customer + titular honorific nim).

24.4.4 Two Competing Forms of “You”: Caki and Caney

Another ongoing linguistic change in which gender plays a pivotal role is the selective use of the terms caki and caney, or “you”. Unlike Japanese, which has more distinctive gender terms (e.g., the male boku and ore “I” vs. female atashi “I”), Korean is believed not to have gendered personal pronouns. Currently, however, caki has emerged as a gender-specific second person pronoun “you” used by women, between women, whereas the existing caney “you” is used by men, between men. This is not to say that there is a one-to-one correspondence between speaker’s gender and the choice between caki vs. caney. Complicating this phenomenon further is that currently the use of caney is on the decline while that of caki is on the rise; accordingly, some men have taken up using caki. This section is devoted to their discussion.

24.4.4.1 Development of Caki and Caney: From Reflexive to Second Person Pronouns

The developmental trajectories of caki and caney show many similarities. In Korean, reflexive pronouns have often served as sources for the second person pronouns (e.g., tangsin and inyek) (Hwang 2001; K. Lee 1978; J. Park 1992; Sohn 1999), and the same can be said for caki and caney. The reflexive pronoun caney was extended in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries into a second-person pronoun which was used regardless of the speaker’s gender, including use by married couples (Hwang 2001). Currently, however, the use of caney is mostly restricted to middle-aged or older male speakers. As males have been the demographic majority in the workplace, caney has also been commonly used in institutional settings. Consequently, the term carries a connotation of formality, hierarchy, and authority.

The term caki was also originally a reflexive pronoun and is still used as such. In the 1970s, it began to be used as a second-person pronoun between lovers and married couples (M. Kim 2015; Park and Chae 1999). As recently as the 1990s, its use extended as a second-person pronoun between female speakers in close relationships. Unlike caney, caki carries casual, private, and intimate connotation.

24.4.4.2 Women’s Use of Caki

Through a survey, Park and Chae (1999) identify the most typical users of caki as housewives with children, whose ages range from the late twenties to mid-fifties. The use of caki is prevalent between close female friends who were befriended after they become adults. In Korean, the first name cannot be used in addressing an adult because such use is considered degrading, and Korean second-person pronouns including caki and caney can only be used to people of equal or lower status (K. Lee 1978: 330).

Further investigating this, M. Kim (2015) analyzes 400 minutes of natural conversations involving twelve Korean married women. The study confirms that caki is a solidarity term which is exchanged only between close friends, and further proposes two factors that foster its use among married women. First, following Korean tradition, children’s names extensively replace mothers’ names to the degree that mothers’ real names are rarely used. For instance, if Kim has a son Ken, she is addressed as “Ken’s mom” or even “Ken” by her friends and acquaintances. In this situation, the new second-person pronoun caki provides an alternative avenue for friends to directly address each other without using their children’s names.

Secondly, contrary to the traditional view that their conversations are merely gossip, Korean mothers’ conversations contribute to building “networks”, which Korean media has termed the ajumma network “married women’s network” and described as a newly emerging power network (e.g., Joongang Daily September 19, 2008; it was also embodied as a major theme in the TV drama series SKY Castle in 2019). In their conversations, Korean mothers share invaluable information, especially pertaining to their children’s education. In the highly competitive Korean educational system, mothers share information about teachers and courses at school, good private tutors, and potential tutoring mates for group tutoring. This kind of exclusive information is circulated only among close friends – the network insiders. Consequently, claiming and maintaining the membership of the network is of essential importance and the use of the solidarity term caki helps mothers do exactly that.

Regarding the relationship between “power” and “solidarity”, Tannen (1993, 2003) challenges Brown and Gilman (1960) and argues that the two are not separate from each other but are in “a paradoxical relationship” because one entails the other. She states, “any show of solidarity necessarily entails power, in that the requirement of similarity and closeness limits freedom and independence” (1993: 167). Women’s adoption of the new solidarity pronoun caki seems to be similarly motivated by the benefits of being integrated into mothers’ power networks.

24.4.4.3 Spread of Caki Crossing the Gender Line

M. Kim and Strauss (2018) examine the use of caki and caney at workplaces analyzing four television drama series, and report that the use of caki is spreading at workplaces. Female speakers have brought caki to workplaces and use it not only to address other women but also younger males. Companies with a male-dominant culture continue to use caney (e.g., a trading company in An Incomplete Life 2014), whereas companies with a female-dominant culture have started to use caki (e.g., fashion magazine publisher in Style 2009).

Korean men use caney and job titles (e.g., Professor Kim) to address each other at work. Even outside of the workplace, Koreans generally consider the use of job titles to be one of the most respectful ways of addressing or referring to adults (J. Park 1997: 512). However, some men have started to use caki instead of caney with their close friends (Park 1992; Park and Chae 1999) to evoke friendly and personal feeling. For instance, on the reality TV show Samsi Seykki Echon Pyen (“Three Meals a Day: Fishing Village” 2015–2016), the actor Cha addresses his close friend Yu with caki. Cha is fashionable and contemporary as he is a former model. Yu, however, does not reciprocate, since he is a more traditional male.

M. Kim (2015) suggests that one of the main reasons behind the decline of caney is the very sense of formality and authority. When caney is used towards a person of lower status, it evokes a sense of hierarchy and rigidity. It is for this same reason that some women use caney at the workplace (e.g., a female professor’s use of caney to her students in an engineering class described in M. Kim 2015). With rapid westernization and democratization, however, Korean society is moving from a formal hierarchy towards casual solidarity; accordingly, the authoritative connotation of caney makes its use less appealing. In contrast, caki is a friendly and personal term, primarily used in informal settings.

M. Kim and Strauss (2018) draw similarities between the spread of caki and the generalization of tu (informal second-person pronoun “you”, as opposed to the formal vous) in French. Morford (1997) sees this “generalized use of tu” as a crucial sign of a broader transformation of French society and their language ideology moving toward more casual, less status-conscious, informal, “warm” and egalitarian modes (4). Similarly, Korean speakers can index their identity through the use of caki as modern, non-hierarchical, non-authoritarian, and warm while caney evokes a sense of hierarchical power and formality. Since solidarity is the new “power” (e.g., “the paradox of power and solidarity”, Tannen 1993), caney is currently giving way to caki and even some men have started to use caki instead of caney.

Earlier, it was mentioned that there seems to exist a dichotomy, perceptual or real, between the public sphere and formal language (e.g., supnita, yey, caney, job titles) on the men’s side and the private sphere and casual language (e.g., eyo, ney, caki, kinship terms) on the women’s. Traditionally, it is the men’s language style that has been used in formal and professional settings. Hence, Eckert (1998) observes that women moving into prestigious professions are perceived as “interlopers, and are at greater pains to prove that they belong” (67).

At the same time, with the spread of more democratic, egalitarian ideologies, Korean culture is overall moving towards the informal and personal, a trend that has spilled over into the workplace. This seems to be a global trend, and its effect on language is not limited to Korean. Cameron (2005: 498) observes:

In some workplaces, however, it is no longer a stereotypically masculine style of language-use that constitutes the norm [;…] economic globalization is affecting workplace linguistic norms and in many cases, arguably, ‘feminizing’ them. In advanced and rapidly advancing economies […] the style of interaction required is one conventionally associated with the private sphere and its symbolically feminine qualities of co-operation, nurturance, empathy and emotional expressiveness.

The growing popularity of caki across the gender line and the decreasing popularity of the formal ender supnita and formal yey “yes” among younger people provide evidence supporting the argument that Korea is indeed changing in that direction.

24.5 Discourse Strategies and Regional Dialects

This section reviews two remaining issues on language and gender in Korean, namely, discourse strategies and styles in Section 24.5.1, and speakers’ attitudes toward regional dialects in Section 24.5.2.

24.5.1 Discourse Strategies

Studies on gender difference in discourse strategies are sparse in Korean (Wang 1999: 205). I review only four studies that examine the speech acts of disagreement and request, and the discourse styles in narration and descriptions.

24.5.1.1 Disagreement, Request, and Complaint

Studies have proposed that women are less direct and more polite in their language use especially in disagreement (e.g., Tannen and Kakave 1992). Wang (1999) examines the disagreement behavior of college students and concludes that there are no notable differences between genders. She reports that “situation can be more of a factor than gender in determining how directly or indirectly one chooses to speak” (44) and that contrary to common assumptions (including Min 1995 and S-K. Lee and Kim 1992), expressions that signal hesitation or uncertainty such as “it looks as if” or “it is likely that” were equally used by both genders.

S. Kang (2004) and S. J. Lee (2014) survey college students to examine their rejection strategies (e.g., to reject a friend’s proposal to start a relationship) and complaining strategies (e.g., to complain to someone who is talking too loudly in the library) respectively. Both studies conclude that there is no significant gender difference. S. J. Lee also states that contrary to common belief, female students nowadays use slang words between friends as much as male students do.

The above three studies all analyze the behavior of female college students’ who are relatively empowered women. Regardless of what may seem to be a limitation, the results are consistent.

24.5.1.2 Narration and Description

S. J. Lee (2014) reports that female college students, when given the task of describing a situation shown in four-cut cartoons, tend to provide a more detailed and lengthy description and use significantly more onomatopoeias. A similar result is found in Jung (2015), who examines naturally occurring conversations (Sejong Corpus) between same-gender close friends of forty-one college students.

S. Jung focuses on two forms and their functions in narration. She points out that in narration, ~ta is used to mark the premise of the circumstance(s) that the speaker is about to reveal, and ~(u)n/nun keya is used to mark an unexpected realization or surprise that comes to the speaker within/through/after the premise. Ta is also used to quote others’ speech verbatim. In her data, women use both forms more frequently than men. In women’s interactions, providing an unfolding chronological event with detail is important since this allows the narrator and the hearer to experience the story together. In men’s interaction, the outcome or gist of the story is emphasized over the process. She concludes that Korean men and women use narratives as communicative strategies differently. Men focus on the “tale” and position themselves more subjectively whereas women focus on the “telling”, and position their identity intersubjectively.

24.5.2 Preference for Standard Seoul Korean

Studies in different languages have shown that women tend to prefer prestigious standard speech to vernacular forms than men do (e.g., Labov 1966; Trudgill 1972). Korean studies thus far have mostly relied on surveys, and their results have been consistent: women show a more negative attitude toward their own dialects than men (e.g., C. Lee 1981; Min 1997).²

J-B. Lee (2007) adopts a more qualitative approach and provides insightful analysis on this phenomenon. He analyzes postings of an internet café and blog which some forty-year-old alumni of an elementary school in Kyungnam province participate in. The results indicate that although both men and women use dialects to promote solidarity, men are more positive about their dialect than women. Women try to avoid it in their daily life if possible, especially since they have reached middle age and do not want to sound “boorish and unpolished”. These attitudes are well reflected in their postings.

In their communications in the internet café where all sixty-three alumni are members and no outsiders can have access, men used dialects 28% more than women. In their communications in a blog where only close friends of the alumni group are members, but potential outsiders are able to gain access, men used dialects at a higher rate of 58% more than women. J-B. Lee explains this increase as follows: men use dialects more since they focus on the blog’s access by close friends and on how dialect enhances solidarity amongst them, whereas women use it less since they are more aware that it is open to the public and accessible by strangers. In other words, the same blog space is perceived differently by men and women as women pay attention to potential readers. Trudgill (1972) argues that women use prestigious standard language more since they are more status-conscious. Minimally, J-B. Lee’s study confirms that women are more conscious of others’ perception of them and thus exert more effort to present themselves in a “desirable” way.

24.6 Conclusion

In this chapter, I have examined the field of language and gender and surveyed it in the context of Korean studies. This survey has revealed three major findings. First, Korean speakers perform gender in a manner similar to the way they perform any other identities (e.g., teacher, daughter, etc.) using language as their primary resource. For instance, male teens perform “masculinity” in their interactions with other male teens, using blunt and rough language such as the interrogative nya (rather than ni and e) and the reply token e “yeah” (rather than ung). Women insert nasal sounds and elongate the final syllable in texting (e.g., polite ender eyong or eyo-o instead of eyo) more than men; these features can add a lively or softer feeling, which effectively index Korean femininity.

Second, Korean is well known for its highly sophisticated linguistic resources that can index hierarchy, formality, closeness, etc., and there seems to exist a symbolic dichotomy involving these linguistic resources and genders. Looking at relative frequency, men tend towards formal language such as caney “you”, yey “yes”, and supnita style whereas women use casual language such as caki “you”, ney “yes”, and eyo style. Women may feel that they are “interlopers” in prestigious professions, where formal language is preferred, and may have to bridge a greater gap to traverse private and professional personae.

Third, Korea is rapidly moving toward a more egalitarian, and away from a hierarchical, formal, society. Consequently, casual language is being favored over formal language (e.g., caney, supnita, and yey), especially among the younger generations and regardless of gender.

Ochs (1992) stresses “gender ideologies are socialized, sustained, and transformed through language” (336). Language and gender is a field with great potential to bring about impactful changes in society. Perhaps, the fruit of Koreans’ growing awareness of linguistic inequality can be seen in the increasing number of people who try to address both genders in a more symmetrical manner. As adult women unknown to speakers are addressed as emenim “mother”, adult men in similar situations are also being addressed as apenim “father”, instead of typical job titles such as sacangnim “president”. Furthermore, the use of the gender-neutral term kokayknim “customer” (customer-titular honorific nim) is spreading in retail stores and other service-related industries. Recently the Korean government announced that they will propose new terms that can replace family terms that have exacerbated gender inequality such as tolyennim “young nobleman” to address the husband’s younger brother vs. chenam “wife’s brother” to address wife’s younger brother (KBS News, January 23, 2019). This proposal was made possible because the Korean people themselves have become aware of this linguistic inequality. According to the government’s survey, 97% of women and 57% of men agree that such unequal family terms should be amended (KBS News, January 23, 2019).

Notwithstanding the notable progress that research on Korean language and gender has achieved over the last three decades, there is still much room for improvement. First, previous studies have too often relied on surveys, on college students (as they are readily available on college campuses), and on quantitative analyses of amalgamated corpora. There is a need for more qualitative research of language and gender in local communities, studying them in their full complexity. In doing so, we need to answer not only “what the gendered differences are”, but also the more important question of, “why these differences exist” (e.g., Cameron 1995: 42). Research questions should be further diversified, and research data moved beyond conversations to include diverse types of discourse. Possible topics include strategies in political debates; Korean queer language and identities; socio-phonetics and phonology; and gender issues in mass media coverage (e.g., the Me Too movement and related legal cases). Language and gender is by nature an interdisciplinary field. Utilizing its analytical apparatus, researchers can investigate a wide range of topics combining the study of language with diverse topics in society and culture that touch upon gender.