KORA398K

This is a CIC courseshare course. The instructor, Professor Sang-Seok Yoon, is at the University of Iowa, but UMD students enroll and receive it at UMD. The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the various sociolinguistic phenomena in contemporary Korean society. The course will address such topics as general linguistic characteristics of Korean,Confucianism and honorifics, language changes, gender differences, generation differences and Korean contacts with Chinese, Japanese and English etc. Especially, the discussions will focus on various linguistic phenomena found in contemporary pop culture such as Korean movies, dramas, K- popsand commercials. Korean society has been experiencing rapid changes,especially after the Second World War, and naturally, contemporary Korean language reflects those changes. While discussing the sociolinguistic characteristics of Korean, this course will also introduce various cultural aspects and brief history of Korea.