Korean Linguistics

An Yelee is a Ph.D. candidate in Korean Linguistics at Yonsei University, South Korea. She has been exploring the relation between social changes and language changes. Her research focuses on the Korean language shifts that happened in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when pre-modern Korea was turning into a modern society. At the Harvard-Yenching Institute, she is examining modern media, such as newspapers and magazines, which played key roles in spreading knowledge and initiating social and cultural changes in the late 19th and early 20th century, to see how the socio-historical approach to the language changed. She will focus on language variations according to genre, author background, target readers and writing style. This research will support her endeavor to develop a theory of how and why Korean sentence structure went through rapid shifts in the process of modernization.