This was interesting to me and i’m lucky enough to know someone who natively speaks korean and plays limbus in kr so i asked him about it! All credit to Ciel @/10seisan for this incoming text wall :)

Here’s what he had to say:

I, too, read that Hong Lu’s tone and speech patterns as being more feminine. Specifically, I would describe his tone as sounding like a mixture of customer service and feminine speech, if that makes sense. His vocal inflexions are more noticeable and they tend to go upwards in pitch, which is associated with feminine speech patterns. I would say that what the asker sent about how women tend to speak here is accurate, and I think that misogyny plays a large role in it as well. As an example, the passive speaking, we have the word 돌려서 말하다, which means “to indirectly speak about a topic” or “beat around the bushes”. This is somewhat expected for people of all genders in formal situations to be polite, but women tend to do it more often and in less formal situations as well due to societal pressure to not seem “aggressive” by coming across “too strong”. Tangents aside, Hong Lu’s tildes in the text corresponds to the voice lines where he drags out syllables, speaks more softly, and/or has a particularly noticeable rise in inflexion at the end of a sentence, so they certainly are indicative of his feminine mannerisms in speech. As for the ellipses, this depends more on the context, since they can be used simply to indicate pauses, but I wouldn’t be surprised if at least some of them coincided with something specific to his speech mannerisms as well. As for how he compares to the other sinners, I would say that, in some ways, his speech sounds similar to Rodya’s, actually—more so than the other sinners. Especially when it comes to the (canonically) male sinners, his speech is not at all similar to any of them. Yi Sang may be the closest if I were required to choose—solely due to his voice being on the softer side—but even then, Yi Sang has very little inflexion and typically ends his sentences with a fall in pitch, unlike Hong Lu

(Ciel’s thoughts end here)

This is all really interesting to me because as an english speaker (and as a person who tends to tune out vocal performance in general, esp if it’s foreign) i can only catch some of it. The delivery on Hong Lu’s lines make sense, especially when taking his background from his source book into account. (whether you want to purely read this as overly formal speech bc of the whole “family is like a cohort of kin looking for a chance to stab you in the back” thing or you want to read gender in it is up to you)

The fact it’s most similar to Rodya’s speech patterns is interesting too… I notice this in the english text as well (i’ve seen people mistake abnormality log text written by Hong Lu for Rodya and vice versa on numerous occasions)
Rodya plays up her feminity a lot as a mask so it makes a lot of sense that it’s the closest to Hong Lu’s but still. very interesting. I’m a huge fan of their dynamic in general but that’s a tangent for a different ask, it’ll just be interesting to see if/what can make Hong Lu drop those speaking patterns…

I could yap a bit more on this but i think i’m just gonna leave it be for now because Ciel did a really good job at explaining it all :)