A Linguistic Image of Womanhood in South Korea

A Linguistic Image of Womanhood in South Korea examines the verbal and non-verbal techniques used by contemporary South Korean women to navigate their society.

South Korea is extremely hierarchical, and this is expressed through a complex array of different politeness levels in words, gestures, and behaviours. These hierarchies were formed over 500 years ago with the introduction of Neo-Confucianism from China, but patriarchal and paternalistic values still linger in contemporary Korean society. In this book, the authors have coined the term ’language cosmetics’ to describe how women in South Korea modify their language and behaviour to conform to social expectations. The book examines womanhood and femininity as seen in popular Korean films, K-dramas, and K-pop. The authors note that feminine language and behaviour are not limited to women (as seen by the practice of aegyo or ’acting cute’ within Korean boy bands), and they describe the tensions between gender hierarchy and socioeconomic status (as seen in the powerful and elegant samonim ladies of K-drama).

This book will be informative for those studying and researching in the fields of Asian studies, cultural studies, linguistics, and East Asian languages, particularly those analysing how society and gender have an impact upon language.

Jieun Kiaer is a Professor of Korean Linguistics at the University of Oxford. She publishes widely on East Asian linguistics - with particular emphasis on pragmatics. Her recent publications include Understanding Korean Film: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (with Loli Kim, 2021), More than Polite (Routledge, forthcoming), and Pragmatic Particles: Findings from Asian Languages (Bloomsbury, 2020).

Jiyoung Shin is Professor of Korean Linguistics at Korea University. Her research areas are Phonetics and Phonology, spoken grammar of Korean, and the role of prosody in subareas of Linguistics. She is also interested in the ideology behind language. Shin has most recently published The Tug-of-War of the Language (Book 21, 2018) and The High Jump of the Language (Influential, 2021). She received the Presidential Commendation for her contributions in family policy in 2020.