Korean speech styles and Finnish terms of address from the perspective of KFL learners

Korean speech styles (hapsyo-chey and hayyo-chey in particular) are compared with Finnish terms of address from the perspective of KFL learners, focusing on three variables, namely “power”, “distance”, and “imposition” (Brown and Levinson, 1987Brown, Penelope & Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ). The comparison is based on Peterson (2010)Peterson, Elizabeth. 2010. Perspective and Politeness in Finnish Requests. Pragmatics 20:3.401–423., which the current study replicates. The data were collected during a Discourse Completion Task: seventy-eight native speakers of Korean were provided with seven scenarios depicting everyday situations. The results underpin the common belief that hayyo-chey is the most common speech style in Korean society. On the pedagogical level, therefore, it should be considered unmarked, meaning that no explication such as “informal polite” is required. However, hapsyo-chey should be introduced as a speech style that may be mixed with hayyo-chey, but also as the norm exclusively used in some restricted formal and writing contexts. Other speech styles may be explained in a similar manner in the KFL classroom.