This is a chapter in which Chinese politeness is compared with politeness in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. With their respective morphological systems of honorification, Japanese and Korean languages are structurally different from Chinese, an isolating language that has hardly any inflectional morphology. These linguistic differences, however, do not prevent the three linguacultures to demonstrate a remarkable degree of similarity in terms of politeness at a deeper level of analysis. The three linguacultures, for instance, seem to be similarly hierarchical in social structure, although they differ in the relative weight a particular factor on a hierarchy has in a given context. The architectural features of language, Chen argues, are not as determinant in politeness as scholars have believed. A culture value such as self-denigration, which often presents itself in terms of politeness, is expressed regardless of how the language is structured linguistically. Vietnamese, on the other hand, is typologically close to Chinese, its culture shares much with Chinese culture, but it was under the French rule for several decades (1985-1954). And yet, B&L-E is shown to be capable of capturing the similarities and differences between it and Chinese in terms of politeness.

Chapter 24 examines the topic of language and gender in the context of Korean studies. Korean is well-known for its highly sophisticated honorifics and other resources that index hierarchy, formality, personal closeness, etc. Korean speakers “perform” gender using politeness distinctions as a primary resource. Studying how gender is performed requires the examination of language and gender in local contexts as they are indexed and constructed. This chapter also looks at the relative frequency of men’s use of formal language such as caney “you”, yey “yes”, and the supnita style, in comparison to women. The result of this is that women may feel like “interlopers” in prestigious professions where formal language is the norm. On the other hand, as Korea is rapidly moving away from a hierarchical society and toward a more egalitarian one, informal language, including caki “you”, ney “yes”, the eyo style, and other patterns associated with women, is becoming preferred over formal language to some extent across genders. This is especially evident among the younger generation.

Chapter 5 describes the four chief domains of linguistic politeness in Korean: speech style, honorifics, terms of address, and gendered language. Based on characteristics of those four areas, the chapter proposes different variables governing when and how to use different components of polite language, in addition to two exceptional subcases of honorifics. The term “politeness” is used in this chapter in a broad sense to denote any linguistic expression that shows respect. Honorifics are a major component of linguistic politeness in this sense, but far from the only one.

Chapter 17 aims to give an integrated account of how subjectivity and intersubjectivity are coded in Korean sentence endings, how such suffixes are diachronically derived from their source constructions, and what typological and socio-cultural factors motivate the emergence and proliferation of such suffixes. The chapter surveys how suffixes index the speaker or both the speaker and addressee as an integral component in their semantic structure. It then examines how such (inter)subjective inflectional suffixes have diachronically been grammaticalized from non-subjective source constructions. The chapter shows that in Korean and in other languages, subjectification tends to lead to intersubjectification and not vice versa. Finally, the chapter argues that the relatively extensive diversity of inflectional suffixes in Korean, especially intersubjective suffixes, is due to two facts: 1) typologically head-final syntax and a typical agglutinative morphology and 2) the time-honored cultural values of hierarchism and collectivism as well as recent dynamic socio-economic mobilities in Korean society and culture.

In Chapter 11, we venture into the realm of language and globalisation, as well as translation, by examining the ways in which translated IKEA catalogues handle (and fail to handle) potential cross-cultural irritations triggered by the translation of the English pronoun you. By so doing, we provide a case study for the cross-cultural pragmatic analysis of pragmatically salient expressions, which often have very different pragmatic meaning and power across linguacultures. In terms of methodology, we first conduct a contrastive pragmatic analysis of translational choices of pronominal form in a variety of catalogues, spanning Belgian French to Mainland Chinese and to Hungarian. Following this, we conduct an ancillary investigation of the linguacultural perceptions of the (in)appropriacy of the translational choices that we are studying, by deploying an ancillary investigation in the form of interviews.

Chapter 9 discusses the relationship between language and society. We describe five areas of sociolinguistic variation: regional (dialects), speech style, honorifics, terms of address, and language policy. Six major regional dialects are described in terms of lexicon, phonology, and morphosyntax: four of South Korea and two of North Korea. We introduce four different speech styles and their usage, together with two now archaic forms. The honorific system is one of the unique features of Korean. We discuss the three basic patterns of honorification, involving the relationship between the speaker, hearer, and referent. We also introduce two patterns that stand aside from the canonical honorific patterns: Apjonpop and indirect honorifics. ‘Terms of address’ refers to how the addressee in a context of social communication is designated. Term of address choice can be extremely complicated. We illustrate second pronouns, titles with proper names, and kinship terms. Finally, we present four major issues that have been the focus of language policy in the Koreas: use of Hangul, language standardization, general language policy, and romanization.