Language and culture are inseparably interrelated. Korean people have developed particular discourse styles that reflect the his torical, cultural and social phenomena and have shared the meaning within the Korean speech community. The Korean traditio...
Language and culture are inseparably interrelated. Korean people have developed particular discourse styles that reflect the his torical, cultural and social phenomena and have shared the meaning within the Korean speech community. The Korean traditional value of collectivism places importance on maintaining group harmony, preserving traditions, and respecting authority rather than expressing individual opinions. The emphasis of the harmonious relationship in Korean traditional society has resulted in collectivism, high-context culture and high self-monitoring culture. Korean discourse styles are constantly influenced by these collectivistic characteristics shared within Korean society. Reflecting the collectivistic features of Korean culture, the pronoun 'we' has developed a special usage beyond marking a simple plural and the mechanism to express one's thoughts and feelings became indirect and digressive. Koreans realized by experience how to negotiate and communicate with nonverbal signals. The terms for social relationship were highly developed because they were expected to speak according to their relational status.
This paper focused on what social and cultural situations have influenced certain discourse styles of Korean language and tried to analyze and explain the collectivistic features of Korean discourse styles according to the sociocultural and contextual frameworks.