Korean

Last Updated: 2019-12-19

Background

Language Family: Isolate

• Korean a language isolate, but it is heavily influenced by Mandarin.
• Korean is spoken in Korea, but also in China, Russia, and other regions of Central Asia.

Phonology

Consonants

• There is some disagreement within the literature about the nature of the affricates, with some sources considering it postalveolar (H. B. Lee 1993, 28) and others considering it alveopalatal (Ahn 2009, 26; Brown and Yeon 2015, 7). We have decided to categorize the affricate as postalveolar.
• H. B. Lee (1993) explains that /j/ and /w/ are not separate phonemes, only appearing as a by-product of diphthongs (p. 30); however, I have chosen to include them in the inventory just as Ahn (2009) and Kim (1999) do (p. 41; p. 315).

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Bilabial	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Stops	p p͈ pʰ	t t͈ tʰ			k k͈ kʰ
Affricates			tʃ t͈ʃ tʃʰ
Fricatives		s s͈				h
Nasals	m	n			ŋ
Approximants		l		j	w
Note: Where three phonemes share a cell, they are ordered plain, tense, and aspirated.

Vowels

• In some dialects of Korean, /e/ and /ɛ/ have merged (Choo and O’Grady 2003, 11–12). Our rules preserve the contrast.
• Vowel length is traditionally contrastive, but it is not obvious from the orthography (H. H. B. Lee 1989). So, our rules will only output normal length vowels (and no long vowels). This reflects the Seoul dialect as spoken by young speakers who do not consistently distinguish length.
• There are two types of diphthongs marked in the Korean orthography.
  • One type of diphthong is sometimes referred to as “y” diphthongs because they have a /j/ sound (Choo and O’Grady 2003).
  • The other type of diphthong is the “w” diphthong.
  • However, these can be interpreted as vowel-glide sequences (Berrjod 2014, 18), so they will be separated in the transcription.

	Front	Central	Back
High	i	ɨ	u
High-Mid	e ø		o
Low-Mid	ɛ		ʌ
Low		a

Alphabet

• The Korean alphabet is known as Hangul. The individual letters are known as jamo, which are composed into syllable blocks.
• There are some notes to be made about how certain sounds have been transcribed as there is some debate in the literature about how best to transcribe particular segments in Korean.
  • As for representing a transcription for the tense stops, there are various methods employed within the literature. Some authors use an apostrophe (e.g. /p’/). However, we have decided to use /◌͈/, which is a diacritic used to indicate “strong articulation.”
  • ⟨ㅚ⟩ is sometimes transcribed as /wɛ/. However, following the traditional vowel system of Korean (Brown and Yeon 2015), our rules transcribe it as /ø/.
  • ⟨ㅡ⟩ has been transcribed in one of two ways within the literature: /ɨ/ or /ɯ/. Our rules use /ɨ/ as “ㅡ is produced with the tongue more forward [than ㅜ]” (Choo and O’Grady 2003).
  • ⟨ㅢ⟩ is often transcribed as /ɰi/; however, /ɰi/ is only found at the beginning of words. Elsewhere, ⟨ㅢ⟩ represents /i/, which is reflected in our rules (Choo and O’Grady 2003).

Consonant Grapheme	Phoneme
ㄱ	/k/
ㄲ	/k͈/
ㅋ	/kʰ/
ㄷ	/t/
ㄸ	/t͈/
ㅌ	/tʰ/
ㅂ	/p/
ㅃ	/p͈/
ㅍ	/pʰ/
ㅅ	/s/
ㅆ	/s͈/
ㅈ	/tʃ/
ㅉ	/t͈ʃ/
ㅊ	/tʃʰ/
ㅁ	/m/
ㄴ	/n/
ㅇ	/ŋ/
ㄹ	/l/
ㅎ	/h/
Vowel Grapheme	Phoneme
ㅏ	/a/
ㅔ	/e/
ㅐ	/ɛ/
ㅣ	/i/
ㅗ	/o/
ㅜ	/u/
ㅡ	/ɨ/
ㅓ	/ʌ/
ㅚ	/ø/
Diphthong Grapheme
ㅑ	/ja/
ㅖ	/je/
ㅒ	/jɛ/
ㅛ	/jo/
ㅠ	/ju/
ㅕ	/jʌ/
ㅢ	/ɨi/
ㅟ	/wi/
ㅞ	/we/
ㅙ	/wɛ/
ㅘ	/wa/
ㅝ	/wʌ/

Lenition Rules

• Voiceless stops become voiced following sonorants and preceding vowels (Ahn 2009, 26–31). They also become voiced intervocalically.
• /l/ is realized as a flap intervocalically (Ahn 2009, 28).

References

Ahn, Sang-Cheol. 2009. Korean Phonology. Saffron.

Berrjod, Victor. 2014. “Korean Vowel Systems: A Study of Vowel Systems in Seoul and Pyongyang.” Master’s thesis, University of Oslo.

Brown, Lucien, and Jaehoon Yeon. 2015. The Handbook of Korean Linguistics. John Wiley & Sons.

Choo, Miho, and William Delaney O’Grady. 2003. The Sounds of Korean: A Pronunciation Guide. University of Hawaii Press.

Kim, Hyunsoon. 1999. “The Place of Articulation of Korean Affricates Revisited.” Journal of East Asian Linguistics 8 (4). Springer Science; Business Media LLC: 313–47. doi:10.1023/a:1008331010694.

Lee, Hansol H. B. 1989. Korean Grammar. Oxford University Press.

Lee, Hyun Bok. 1993. “Korean.” Journal of the International Phonetic Association 23 (1). Cambridge University Press: 28–31.