Korean internet discussions, especially those of teens, tend to be full of deliberate spelling errors. In this work, I tried to find out if there is any phonological way to clarify these...Show moreKorean internet discussions, especially those of teens, tend to be full of deliberate spelling errors. In this work, I tried to find out if there is any phonological way to clarify these alternative spellings by analysing a multitude of discussions on the Korean internet platform Naver Cafe. I collected spelling errors from these discussions and compared them to the official spelling of Korean. To ensure a consistent corpus of data, I only considered recent discussions about BTS, a Korean boy band that is popular among female Korean teens. All collected spelling errors could be divided into accidental spelling errors and deliberate spelling errors. Most of these deliberate spelling errors are based on the pronunciation rules of the Korean writing system, making the spellings stand closer to their actual pronunciations than their correct counterparts. A small proportion of all deliberate spelling errors is based on morphophonological rules that are usually only applied in the context of verbal morphology. All of this shows that Korean language users tend to be very creative while writing their language, usually for the sake of coming across cute or innocent. From this we can conclude that even spelling errors can be a fruitful source of information.Show less
