Korea has a very complicated honorifics system. In the English language, if you want to show respect to the person you’re interacting with or to the person you’re referring to in your sentence, you’d show respect by adding a Ms./Mr./Dr. or sir/madam before their name, or you’d refer to them by using their full name. This is probably the most complicated that the English honorifics system can get. However, in Korean culture people never really use full names while conversing, instead the Korean language has a complicated honorifics system. This system not only a lot of different terms for addressing someone respectfully, but there also exist multi-tiered speech levels which communicate different degrees of respect; for example different conjugations of a verb can imply different levels of respect.The thing that further complicates this is that in Korean culture there is a clear hierarchy where people older than oneself, people holding a higher social rank than oneself, and people working in more reputable professions than oneself are clearly meant to be held in higher honor than oneself. This hierarchy is held in very high regard and it is frowned upon when people don’t follow it while interacting with others. This is the reason why when people who are unfamiliar with the Korean culture want to learn Korean, they should learn the conjugations of words that imply high respect and politeness in order to make sure that they don’t offend anyone who embraces the Korean culture.
If I were to simplify the Korean honorifics system, I’d say that it has three main levels informal, standard, and formal. These can further be divided into multiple levels of respect and politeness, but this is the big umbrella. The formal is to show respect, the standard is for everyday speech, and the informal is for close relationships. For example, a student would talk to their upperclassman using formal speech because the upperclassman is older and more knowledgeable than the student; a person would talk to their classmates using standard speech; a daughter could talk to her mother using informal speech because even though the mother is older and definitely held with higher regard than the daughter, they probably share a close relationship so they can use informal speech with each other. This helps people who aren’t familiar with the Korean culture get a good broader picture of the situation. For me, understanding the Korean honorifics system was pretty simple because both Telugu and Hindi (Telugu more so than Hindi) also have similar honorifics systems where different terms can be used for addressing people politely and imply higher regard and different conjugations of verbs can imply different levels of politeness and respect. However, unlike Korean which has multi-tiered levels of speech, Telugu only has three main ones. Here’s an example that offers a glimpse into the levels of speech in Korean:
The standard form of a verb meaning ‘to see’ is 보다 and the words given below are all conjugations of the same word but they’re in ascending order of formality and politeness.
봐요, 보다, 보시다, 보세요, 보십니다
The words above don’t include many conjugations for informal speech (like the one used between close friends) because for a beginner, such as myself, Prof. Sumi Kim made sure to focus on formal speech. Yet there’s already 3 levels of formal speech which can give you an idea of how complicated the Korean honorifics system can get.
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