Aspects of Variations of ‘ye’ and ‘ne’ Observed in the Dialogues of the Instant Messenger KakaoTalk

Kang, Hyeon-Seok & Kim, Minji

minjikim@chamc.co.kr

김민지

Abstract

This paper investigates the variations found in the use of ‘ye’ and ‘ne’ in the conversations of the mobile messenger KakaoTalk. This study was conducted based on the dialogues from the 159 KakaoTalk chat rooms, using the statistical package Language Variation Suite. As many as 17 variants of ‘ye’ and ‘ne’ were observed in the data analyzed compared to just the four variants of the speech data (Kang 2009), revealing a big difference between the two data types. Further, the ‘ne’ variants were absolutely dominant, comprising 90% of the tokens, making them gender-neutral in this variation. Regression analyses showed that ‘gender’ was the most important constraint influencing the variation: Men used the ‘ye’ variants 25% of the time, while women used them only 4% of the time. Age was another important factor: Older people used the ‘ye’ variants more than younger people. This study reveals that the new medium of net language (Crystal 2001) could produce radically different results from spoken language even when the same sociolinguistic variables are analyzed, and it may point to a new direction of research in variation theory.

인스턴트 메신저 카카오톡의 대화 자료에 나타난 ‘예’와 ‘네’의 변이 양상

강현석･김민지

단국대･차의과학대

초록

Vol. 40 No. 4 (2022.12)

Journal Abbreviation j. Korea Saf. Manag. Sci.
Frequency Published four times annually in March, June, September, and December
Doi Prefix 10.14353/sjk.
Year of Launching 1993
Publisher The Sociolinguistic Society of Korea

Indexed/Tracked/Covered By