Editing Politeness (section)

==Linguistic devices==
{{main|Honorifics (linguistics)}}
Besides and additionally to the above, many languages have specific means to show politeness, deference, respect, or a recognition of the [[social status]] of the speaker and the hearer. There are two main ways in which a given language shows politeness: in its [[lexicon]] (for example, employing certain words in formal occasions, and colloquial forms in informal contexts), and in its [[morphology (linguistics)|morphology]] (for example, using special verb forms for polite discourse). The [[T–V distinction]] is a common example in Western languages, while some Asian languages extend this to [[pronoun avoidance|avoiding pronouns entirely]]. Some languages have complex politeness systems, such as [[Korean speech levels]] and [[honorific speech in Japanese]].

[[Japanese language|Japanese]] is perhaps the most widely known example of a language that encodes politeness at its core. Japanese has two main levels of politeness, one for intimate acquaintances, family, and friends, and one for other groups, and verb morphology reflects these levels. Besides that, some verbs have special hyper-polite [[suppletion|suppletive]] forms. This happens also with some nouns and interrogative pronouns. Japanese also employs different personal pronouns for each person according to gender, age, rank, degree of acquaintance, and other cultural factors.