Politeness in language

From UniLang Wiki

This page is meant to be a general overview page and a kind of summary about how various languages have different levels of politeness for speaking with other people. Another main function will be to provide links to more detailed pages in the corresponding language sections.

Politeness is an important part of day-to-day communication. Most people know instinctively how to deal with other people of their culture and in their native language. When speaking another language, though, especially in a different culture, one should be aware of the differences.

There are various levels of politeness. This may be expressed in the type of words/vocabulary that one uses, or it may also be an integral part of a language's grammar.

Languages with only one level of grammatical politeness

Nowadays English only uses one level of grammatical politeness. When speaking to someone, you always use the form "you". You can use it while speaking with your little sister, and also with the queen (though in this case you may also use "Your Majesty", or "Your Royal Highness"). English used to have two levels of politeness, thou and you. However, over time, "thou" became less and less used, until it disappeared entirely and "you" was left to serve as the pronoun of choice for all situations.

Languages with two levels of grammatical politeness

This is probably the most common case, especially in Indo-European languages. For example French uses the word pair tu/vous, Persian uses the word pair to/šomâ, Spanish uses tu/Usted, Portuguese uses tu/você, Italian uses tu/Lei, German uses du/Sie, Dutch uses jij/U and Russian uses the wordpair ты/вы. Because the verb often changes form, for example between 2nd person singular and 3rd person plural, you also have to know how to change the verb accordingly.

In Swedish, on the other hand, where verbs change only for different tenses, not persons, the pair du/Ni may be simply substituted without having to change anything else. In Mandarin Chinese you may also simply exchange the pair 你/您.

Politeness in Polish is based on using an appropriate word (eg pan/ pani ‘sir/ madam’ or państwo ‘sir and madam’) and a verb always in the third person, eg: Czy chce pani, aby otworzyć okno? ‘Does madam want to open the window?’

Languages with multiple levels of grammatical politeness

Japanese politeness is famous for its array of bewildering politeness levels. The most common formal version is the verb ending -mas(u) at the end of a verb, or the use of suffixes such as -san or -sama, or prefixes such as o- or go-. Depending on whether the person you are speaking with has a higher or lower social status, you would use different personal pronouns or verbs.

In Thai politeness there are also different types of polite language; the king almost speaks a different language in court.

Korean politeness is not that famous, but it is definitively complex... So complex that just a few languages (2 or 3 perhaps) are similar in the politeness aspect. In Korean, you mainly have 3 forms of politeness: the impolite form, known as 반�?(Banmal), the informal polite (most used) and the formal polite. These rules apply for most of the words in the vocabulary. The termination of the verb conjugations depends on those rules, with the use of suffixes such as YO, DA, KA.

An example: Hello!

                  안녕하세요(Annyeonghaseyo) Informal Polite 

                  안녕하십니까(Annyeonghasipnika) Formal Polite 

                  안녕(Annyeong) Impolite* 

• It's not completely impolite, though still might count as a Banmal word.

Another feature of Korean politeness is the use of vocabulary. Your parents can never have '밥(BAB, meal)' but '진지(JINJI, same word, with more politeness),' and you'd better not ask for '�?�름(IREUM, name)' of an elderly but '성함(SEONGHAM)'.