• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.16 no.10
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• pp.6527-6533
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• 2015

It is generally accepted that there are differences between men and women in linguistic communication style. Genderlect is a socio-linguistic term to refer to the linguistic differences spoken by specific gender. Some linguistic features are provided as evidence to show the genderlects: pitch, lexicon, intonation, grammar and styles. The purpose of this paper is to compare the characteristics of genderlect in English and Korean. To do so, I analyzed the scripts of an English movie, 'Mrs. Doubtfire' and Korean tv drama, 'Oohlala couple'. In "Mrs. Doubtfire, tension and laughter arose out of discrepancy from the way he looked (as a woman) and the way he spoke (like a man). The same is true with "Oohlala couple." In the language of Mrs. Doubtfire, male speech characteristics with nouns were salient while in "Oohlala couple" with verb forms, especially with honorific style, which shows a difference between Korean and English genderlect. Korean language has special genderlect characteristics with honorific speech style realized in verb endings. In Korean the highest honorific speech style, 'Habsho-che' is used in official situation and men are more accustomed to it than women. When women have to use polite expressions they have to choose between the highest honorific style, 'Habsho-che' losing the female characteristics or the second highest honorific style 'Haeyo-che' keeping the female characteristics.