2017, Vol.25, No.3

The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.57

pISSN : 1226-4822
https://journal.kci.go.kr/socioling

This paper investigates the variations found in the use of ‘ye’ and ‘ne’ in the conversations of the mobile messenger KakaoTalk. This study was conducted based on the dialogues from the 159 KakaoTalk chat rooms, using the statistical package Language Variation Suite. As many as 17 variants of ‘ye’ and ‘ne’ were observed in the data analyzed compared to just the four variants of the speech data (Kang 2009), revealing a big difference between the two data types. Further, the ‘ne’ variants were absolutely dominant, comprising 90% of the tokens, making them gender-neutral in this variation. Regression analyses showed that ‘gender’ was the most important constraint influencing the variation: Men used the ‘ye’ variants 25% of the time, while women used them only 4% of the time. Age was another important factor: Older people used the ‘ye’ variants more than younger people. This study reveals that the new medium of net language (Crystal 2001) could produce radically different results from spoken language even when the same sociolinguistic variables are analyzed, and it may point to a new direction of research in variation theory.

The purpose of this paper is to research the word formation and meaning of newly coined words in modern Polish, and to investigate latest social changes in present Poland reflected in these new words. This paper consists of two main sections. The first section describes the linguistic analysis of newly coined words of Polish origin and loanwords from various languages. A large number of English words have flowed into Polish for a variety of reasons. English loanwords occupied about 70% of the database in this study database. The second section examines the socio-cultural changes through an analysis of words in various fields. From the analysis of gathered lexical database we can confirm the acceptance phenomenon of the most frequently, sometimes excessively used English loanwords among the young generation in Poland and look over the changes in Polish society through each word.

This study investigated how computer-mediated communication with non-hierarchical language use such as using no titles or honorific forms affects speakers' participation in group discussion in a hierarchical organization setting. Assuming that the complexity of the Korean honorific system could be a factor of Korean students' or employees' passive participation in discussion in class or workplace, we examined whether the use of equal-level speech styles would facilitate the active discussion environment. Furthermore, an online chat platform was served as an online discussion space, which enforced equal-level talk. The results showed that the participation rates of speakers of low position, who maintained a low participation rate during offline meetings, gradually increased during online discussion, while participants of high position, who were dominant talkers during offline discussion, appeared less active in online meetings. This revealed a statistically significant interaction between communication mode(online vs. offline) and participants' rank. Although the language effect was not significant statistically, we found a tendency that the participation rate was higher at the equal-level chat room than at the control room. These findings suggest that speakers' act should be influenced by communication modes: speakers of low position seem to participate more freely at an online mode than at an offline mode, although the effect of the Korean honorific system on speakers' participation in discussion was not conclusive.