Korean honorifics

Korean honorifics
Hangul	높임말 / 경어
Hanja	none /
Revised Romanization	nopimmal / gyeongeo
McCune–Reischauer	nopimmal /kyŏngŏ

The Korean language reflects the important observance of a speaker or writer's relationships with both the subject of the sentence and the audience. Korean grammar uses an extensive system of honorifics to reflect the speaker's relationship to the subject of the sentence and speech levels to reflect the speaker's relationship to the audience. Originally, the honorifics expressed the differences in social status between speakers. In contemporary Korean culture, honorifics are used to differentiate between formal and informal speech based on the level of familiarity between the speaker and the listener.

When talking about someone superior in status, a speaker or writer must indicate the subject's superiority by using special nouns or verb endings. Generally, someone is superior in status if he or she is an older relative, a stranger of roughly equal or greater age, an employer, a teacher, a customer, or the like. Someone is equal or inferior in status if he or she is a younger stranger, a student, an employee or the like. The use of wrong speech levels or diction is likely to be considered insulting, depending on the degree of difference between the used form and the expected form.

One way of using honorifics is to use special "honorific" nouns in place of regular ones. A common example is using (jinji) instead of (bap) for "food". Often, honorific nouns are used to refer to relatives. The honorific suffix (-nim) is affixed to many kinship terms to make them honorific. Thus, someone may address his own grandmother as (halmeoni) but refer to someone else's grandmother as (halmeonim).

All verbs and adjectives can be converted into an honorific form by adding the infix (-si-) or (-eusi-) after the stem and before the ending. Thus, (gada, "to go") becomes (gasida). A few verbs have suppletive honorific forms:

A few verbs have suppletive humble forms, used when the speaker is referring to him/herself in polite situations. These include (deurida) and (ollida) for (juda, "give"). 드리다 (deurida) is substituted for 주다 (juda) when the latter is used as an auxiliary verb, while 올리다 (ollida, literally "raise up") is used for 주다 (juda) in the sense of "offer".

Pronouns in Korean have their own set of polite equivalents (e.g., (jeo) is the humble form of (na, "I") and (jeohui) is the humble form of (uri, "we")). However, Koreans usually avoid using the second-person singular pronoun, especially when using honorific forms, and often avoid the third-person pronouns as well. So, although honorific form of (neo, singular "you") is (dangsin, literally, "friend" or "dear"), that term is used only as a form of address in a few specific social contexts, such as between two married couples or in an ironic sense between strangers. Other words are usually substituted where possible (e.g., the person's name, a kinship term, a professional title, the plural yeoreobun, or no word at all, relying on context to supply meaning instead).

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