족 (jok) attached to a noun marks a category of people who live a certain way. 캥거루족 (kaenggeuru-jok) is the kangaroo tribe, meaning adults who still live with their parents.
The character is 族, the same one used for tribe or clan, and that borrowed weight is the whole flavor of the suffix. It sorts people into demographic bins. You will see it romanized jok and jog, and older English articles sometimes translate it as “-tribe,” which reads oddly but is not wrong.
Examples
캥거루족 (kaenggeuru-jok)
Grown children living at home, named for the pouch. Usually appears in articles about housing costs and youth employment.
올빼미족 (olppaemi-jok)
Night owls. From 올빼미, the bird. One of the older ones and completely neutral.
딩크족 (dingkeu-jok)
DINK, dual income no kids, imported straight from English and given a 족.
나홀로족 (naholro-jok)
People who do things alone by preference. Restaurant articles love this one.
캠핑족 (kaemping-jok)
Campers, as a market segment. Note that this does not mean “a camper” the way English uses it. It means the camping-doing population.
오렌지족 (orenji-jok)
Wealthy young people in 1990s Gangnam. Nobody has been an 오렌지족 for thirty years, and the word survives as a period reference the way “yuppie” does in English.
Nobody calls themselves this
Here is the thing every vocabulary list gets wrong by omission. 족 is a third-person suffix. It comes from journalism and marketing, and it describes a group from the outside, from above, with a slight air of having discovered something.
Which is why 저 자취족이에요 sounds like you are narrating a documentary about your own life. It is grammatical. It is also a very strange thing to say about yourself, because you have just categorized yourself the way a newspaper trend piece would.
Koreans do occasionally use it about themselves, and when they do it is a joke, with the newsreader tone deliberately audible.
족 vs 러 vs 파
Three suffixes that all attach to activities and produce a person, and they are not swappable.
러 (-reo) is the internet one. Self-applied, casual, and it means you personally do the thing. 자취러 (jachwi-reo) is what someone actually calls themselves when they live alone.
족 is the print one. Applied to others, plural in feel, and it means a population that does the thing.
파 (-pa) means faction, which side you take in a dispute. The classic pair is 부먹파 (bumeok-pa) and 찍먹파 (jjigmeok-pa), the two camps on whether sweet and sour pork sauce should be poured over the dish or served on the side. 파 needs an opposing camp to exist. 족 does not.
So 자취러 and 자취족 both mean people who live alone, and one is a self-description while the other is a demographic.
What not to do
Do not use 족 to someone’s face about them. 너 캥거루족이네 (you’re a kangaroo-tribe) turns a person into a category in front of them, and several of these categories carry judgment. 캥거루족 in particular implies failure to launch, and it is not a neutral observation no matter how lightly you say it.
Do not assume it means an individual. 캠핑족이 늘었다 means the camping population grew, not that one camper got bigger. When 족 shows up in a headline it is almost always a statistical claim.
Do not coin new ones expecting them to land. The suffix looks productive and it is, but new 족 words are made by journalists reaching for a hook, and one invented on the spot in conversation sounds like you are pitching a segment.
Formality is the reverse of usual
Most words in this series are casual slang you must keep out of formal writing. 족 runs the other way. It is entirely at home in a newspaper, a market report, or a policy paper. 1인 가구 and 나홀로족 can appear in the same government document.
The register problem is conversational. In print it is analysis. Spoken to a person about that person, the same word becomes a label being applied to them, and the distance that makes it useful in an article is exactly what makes it cold in a room.
If you are reading Korean news, 족 is worth knowing well, since the words built with it are usually the whole thesis of the article compressed into three syllables.