This study aims to set up the categories of doublespeak that exist in Korean and English, and compare the phases and effect of them. Doublespeak is considered as a negative phase of a language, because it is intentional and deliberate. This kind of sp ...
This study aims to set up the categories of doublespeak that exist in Korean and English, and compare the phases and effect of them. Doublespeak is considered as a negative phase of a language, because it is intentional and deliberate. This kind of speak can cause social problems, but researches in this area are not active in Korea, except the works of Tae-Hyun Cheon(2002) and Chan-Kyu Lee(2006). In this circumstance, the purpose of this report is to set up the categories of doublespeak, to make a list of their phases which appear in social, political, economic, and cultural areas in English and Korean, and to compare the effects of them.
Doublespeak is a speaking method that one outer expression has another inner message. It is said that by influence of G. Orwell of 1984 this conception was created. There’s still taboo against outspoken inner intention in Korea, as it is considered undignified, due to a long history of Confucian culture. It is true that the taboo has made a lot of cost to our society. I expect that this study could help our society share a common conception about doublespeak as a kind of communication method, and to adapt it appropriately.
For this study, two steps were set: one is to collect cases of doublespeak, another is to survey based on the selected words from the cases. Then, I examined and demonstrated the validity of doublespeak, and investigated the effects on communication, and set up the categories.
The cases of Korean doublespeak were collected from headlines and articles in newspapers, a dictionary of current words, web-sites of political parties and other sites in internet, some common materials, and also in literary(examples from articles and other literary related to doublespeak). And because doublespeak clearly has a cultural nature, the cases of English, the words were selected based on suggestions in William Lutz(1996). The survey was carried out to selected English native speakers whose parents and grandparents were all born in America and raised up there. The survey asked the respondents how familiar the selected words are to them. The respondents were asked to mark each word, by ‘Very Familiar word, Familiar Word, or Not Familiar Word’. And then the list of words was made in order of familiarity.
Two steps of survey were carried to investigate awareness of doublespeak. The first survey was to figure out how many words of doublespeak people know. The respondents were selected from Korean and English speakers by ages. Especially, the English respondents were selected from whose 3 consecutive generations has used English as the mother tongue. Regarding the words that showed high awareness in the first survey, the second survey was executed to find how well the respondents understand and use the words. The second survey was to examine the degrees of using doublespeak by social classes. This survey was also for Korean and English speakers-using English as the mother tongue by three generations. The high-awareness words were extracted from the first survey, and the similar words to the english words were selected. Then, in one set of questionnaire, political, economic, social, and cultural words were placed.
There were 7 sets of questionnaires in Korean survey. And the number of the respondents was 708. In English, there were 3 sets of questionnaires, and 327 respondents. Based on the responses of two surveys, frequency analysis was executed on each item. And by gender, educational level, age, and kinds of jobs, each item was analyzed. In the English survey, the questions demanded short-answers. The responses were analyzed by semantics, and phase analysis was attempted. From the results of those surveys, categorizing of doublespeak, and demonstrating of usefulness, and the contents of awareness about cultural differences were achieved.