Korean Honorifics From Foreign Viewpoint

By Mathias Specht

This article is a loose follow-up to my opinion piece on the much criticized remarks of a 39-year-old Korean judge, which was published in The Korea Times on Feb. 28.

Let me begin with this question: Is the problem of finding the right, appropriately polite, words limited to Korea?

Talking to many Koreans or at least, when following the often more than a little biased reports in the mainstream media, one is easily led to believe so. I frequently hear Korean people around me say that one reason why their language is so hard to learn for foreigners is because of its use of honorific, or polite, speech.

This argument is so common that even a recent article on the decrease in the use of honorific forms in Korean opened with this point. As a student of the Korean language myself, I really can't help wondering, why this is such a tenacious impression, especially since in essence it is rather false, or at least largely negligible.

Yes, Korean is a hard language for foreigners to learn, but why would the fact that it makes use of honorific forms make it so much harder? If you already have to memorize thousands of words, memorizing maybe 20 or so more for the most common special words, such as ``daek" instead of ``jib" for house or ``jinji" (not ``bab") for meal, is really not your main worry. The same is the case for different verb conjugations. In fact, using the polite ending ``-mnida" is often easier than the ``banmal" (informal) version.

While I might be over-simplifying here, my initial point was that the problem is negligible; after all, there are probably few Koreans that would make a scene if a foreigner were to use the wrong level of politeness.

Moreover, the concept of having a polite way of speaking is, at least to many with a European background, rather familiar. German has it; French has it, too. Both of them include special pronouns as well as different verb conjugations. Of course, Japanese has an even richer system of honorific expressions than Korean (and even makes distinctions according to gender). So, there really isn't much that's special about Korean at all in this respect.

In fact even English, which is often used as a yardstick in Korea, has such distinctions, though it might be a little too subtle for some English-language learners to grasp.

George Carlin made this point rather brilliantly in one of his acts, dissecting the increasing fascination in especially American English with ``softening" euphemisms. Grandfathers, for instance, usually ``pass away" in the language of many Americans today, rather than ``die." Not knowing which expression is appropriate and ``politically correct" in a given situation can quickly sound rather rude to many native speakers.

Take the word ``cripple" for instance. While you can find it in the Bible, it would be unacceptable to use in reference to anyone today. Instead, we have words and phrases such as special-needs, handicapped, challenged, impaired, differently-abled and, the most widely used, disabled. There are countless more examples such as occasional irregularity (constipation), health care professional (doctor), negative cash-flow position (broke), economically disadvantaged (poor), substandard housing in the inner cities (slums), or even neutralize or depopulate (kill), all used for otherwise unpleasant things we don't speak about so openly. While some of these are a bit tongue-in-cheek, such a trend clearly exists and must make English harder to learn and use appropriately for non-native speakers.

As a closing point to consider the value of the wide use of formal speech in Korean, let me add a story regarding Korean Air discussed among others by Malcolm Gladwell in his book ``Outliers." Korean Air had in the 1990s become one of the world's most dangerous airlines, with so many crashes that it was eventually excluded from its airline alliance.

The management of Korean Air at that time brought in an American team of consultants to analyze the problem and recommend a solution. While the Korean management had suggested more mandatory hours of flight simulator training for all pilots, the Americans advised them to introduce English as the official on-board language and ban the use of any Korean communication from the cockpit. Korean Air went ahead with this solution and as a result the crashes ceased, the airline's reputation was restored and it became an alliance member again. The consultants had discovered that the reason for the numerous accidents was that co-pilots could not inform captains about mistakes or potentially dangerous situations, because they had to use the most formal style of speech when addressing the captain and this created a barrier, which made criticism almost impossible. Once they used English, this ``artificial wall" was torn down and teamwork and cross-checks became easy.

The writer is an MBA graduate of Yonsei University and founder of the Korean company Stelence International. He is currently writing a book about Korea and can be reached at mathias@stelence.com.