Social Hierarchies in Korean Language and Korean American Discourse

Social Hierarchies in Korean Language and Korean American Discourse

Introduction

This paper intends to explore the divergence that occurs in social hierarchies in Korean American discourse. Further, the main focus of this paper is to answer the given five questions with the help of analyzing the article 'Negotiating Conflict within the Constraints of Social Hierarchies in Korean American Discourse' in depth. It is written by M. Agnes Kang in 2003. Earlier there have been many research conducted by the language and communication experts on the elements of Korean language. To have a better understanding, let us shall have an overview of the historic significance and development of Korean language.

In recent history there have been different evolutions formulated by a common language, caused by the division of the country leading to the Korean War. In South Korea, the standard language is based on the pronunciation and on spelling of the dialect in the capital Seoul. However, in North Korea the standard language is a dialect of Pyongyang. The difference between the dialects of Korean language is marginal, however, so that the Korean language is understood by all Koreans except for the dialects spoken on the island of Jeju. However, the long division of Korea has led to a different development between North and South in terms of Korean language. In North Korea, you try to express new concepts via the derivation of new words that are "pure Korean". North Korean refugees seem to get fatigue early on many English words, which are not known to them.

Discussion

Q1: How is social hierarchy embedded in the Korean language? How is this different than in English?

Many researchers have investigated this subject and their research suggests that social relations are lexicalized and grammaticized in the language of Korea. People of Korea require the speaker to encode their relations to their addressees using morphologically, lexically and grammatically distinct honorific forms (Jouhki, & Paaso, 2011). There is a social hierarchy involved in composing the Korean language. Thus, for this purpose we will analyze the relationships that have a great influence in composition of Korean language. Since there is a vertical hierarchy of relations, it is significant to note here the status of the other person in relation to his own.

The importance of gaining knowledge regarding the status of the person as well as age leads to fascinating social behavior of people. To have in depth insight in to this issue, an example can be quoted here that it is common for a strange man to enquire about the age of other person. Nakamura, Guo and Ervin Tripp regard this type of incidence with the structure of hierarchy of society of Korea and Japan. Again an example shall illustrate the theory hierarchy in relation to social involvement in language. This system of hierarchy discusses the reason that why Japanese businessmen exchange their name cards when they first meet. In this way, both sided people may gauge a kind of relation by knowing ...