A Study on the Actual Usage of Onomatopoeia and Mimetic Words in Korean Audiovisual Media Corpus

This study aims to analyze the actual usage patterns of onomatopoeia and mimetic words in Korean audiovisual media frequently encountered by foreign learners. Onomatopoeia and mimetic words in Korean play a crucial role in vividly conveying emotions and situations due to their rich expressiveness. However, due to cultural differences and difficulties in translation, these words can be challenging for foreign learners. This study references the list of onomatopoeia and mimetic words proposed by 이숙진 and 민진영 (2023) to investigate how frequently these words are used in spoken Korean, and proposes a practical vocabulary list for foreign learners. The research focuses on Korean content produced by Netflix between 2018 and 2024, building a corpus of 296,866 sentences and 1,424,086 words from 58 works to analyze the frequency and context of onomatopoeia and mimetic words in everyday usage. The results show that high-frequency words such as ‘딱’, ‘깜짝’ and ‘쭉’ appear in most works, classifying them as essential vocabulary for beginners. In contrast, low-frequency words that appear only in specific contexts were categorized as intermediate and advanced vocabulary. This study aims to provide helpful learning materials for foreign Korean learners through frequencybased word categorization. Additionally, the results offer implications for developing Korean language textbooks and can be effectively applied in speaking classes. However, this study is limited to Netflix-produced content, suggesting that future research should incorporate a wider range of media and actual spoken language data from native speakers.