Genevieve Dwyer, “Can I Call Her ‘Geunyeo’?: Korean Gender Pronoun Usage versus English Gender Pronoun Usage”
Mentor: Sooho Song, Foreign Languages & Literature, Letters & Science (College of)
Oral Presentation: 9:30am Union E220
Personal pronouns are essential components of English sentences for addressing any individual understood by the interlocutors. Gender pronouns are the same. The English language uses gendered third person pronouns (e.g., he, she, it, they). On the other hand, Korean employs gender-neutral pronouns using a denominator ‘geu’ (that) in conjunction with a generic noun such as ‘bun’ or ‘saram’ (person). This denominator ‘geu’ can serve as a third person masculine pronoun. While Korean has ‘geunyeo’ to indicate female third person which is akin to ‘she,’ it is not commonly employed in everyday discourse. In addition, the Korean language allows the omission of any grammatical components, including the subject and object of the sentence of a phrase, where they are referred by the context. Furthermore, Koreans tend to call people by their names and titles instead of using pronouns. Having these differences in using gendered pronouns, English native speakers may transfer their native language habits and excessively employ pronouns in Korean where Koreans would omit the pronouns or replace them with people’s names. Moreover, translation programs such as Google Translate or Papago may promote excessive use of the gender pronoun ‘geunyeo’ (she) while translating Korean sentences, as the machine must add pronouns to make up for lack of context. Currently, there is a tendency to avoid male and female gender pronouns in favor of the gender-neutral pronoun ‘they’ in the U.S., which also may make learning how to use Korean third-person pronouns more complex. By researching the relationship between Korean and English pronoun usage, this study aims to explore the relationship between language, gender, and culture.