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pp.1-27
Kang, Hyeon-Seok & Kim, Minji. 2017. “Aspects of Variations of ‘ye’ and ‘ne’ Observed in the Dialogues of the Instant Messenger KakaoTalk”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 25(3). 1~27. 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.
