Politeness allows the members of a certain group to avoid conflicts and maintain quality interactions. Linguistically, politeness is expressed in different ways. One of the languages that expresses linguistic politeness particularly systematically is Korean. The Korean politeness system consists of special honorific forms of verbs, particles, and nouns. Furthermore, politeness levels expressed by different sentence endings and pre-final endings added to adjectives and verbs are also part of the system. Politeness is closely related to culture and society, so it is highly dependent on social events in a particular language group. The connection is also noticeable in the case of Korean language. The thesis focuses on the visible changes of politensss in three textbooks for teaching Korean as a foreign language, published between 2000 and 2019. The analyzed textbooks were published by the Korean university Seoul National University. The analysis shows that textbooks are gradually moving away from the more formal polite hasipsio-che towards informal polite haeyo-che. This is predictable regarding general trends of Korean language, where haeyo-che has
already become predominant in everyday language and can, contrary to the traditional notion of politeness levels, also be used in formal situations. Haeyo-che became important in the Korean language especially after the end of the strict hierarchical division based on Confucianism and the acceptance of Western democratic values. Contrary to the past, when the rigid social system pressured speakers to use even the strictest honorifics, linguistic politeness in today’s society is far more flexible. Nevertheless, politeness to interlocutors remains very important, as evidenced by the fact that speakers still often use the informal polite level haeyo-che and not exclusively the informal plain hae-che. In textbooks, in addition to changes in courtesy levels, we also notice changes the general level of formalities.
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