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The role of speaker categorization in South Korean attitudes toward North Korean accents

  • Yu Kyoung Shin

    Yu Kyoung Shin is Assistant Professor in the School of Global Studies at Hallym University. Her research interests include corpus analysis of academic registers and disciplinary variation, as well as generative AI-based instruction, particularly for applications to L2 learning and teaching. Her recent work has appeared in Journal of English for Academic Purposes, Journal of Second Language Writing, TESOL Quarterly, System, English for Specific Purposes, Language and Intercultural Communication, Corpora, Applied Linguistics and Language Teaching Research.

     ORCID logo EMAIL logo     and Stephanie Lindemann

    Stephanie Lindemann is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at Georgia State University. Her research focuses on how listeners’ attitudes or beliefs about speakers affect the success of their communication with those speakers. Her recent work has focused on developing and assessing training that improves people’s skills, strategies, and openness to communication with interlocutors from varied linguistic backgrounds. She has published in journals including Applied Linguistics, International Journal of Applied Linguistics, Journal of Second Language Pronunciation, Language in Society, and Multilingua.

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Published/Copyright: September 19, 2024
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Applied Linguistics Review
From the journal Applied Linguistics Review Volume 16 Issue 3

Abstract

North Koreans in South Korea often try to adopt South Korean accents to avoid discrimination, with varying degrees of success. Language attitudes studies have tended to investigate reactions to distinct varieties rather than speakers’ attempts to approximate new varieties for their own benefit, and while a few have considered the effects of listeners’ categorization of speakers on evaluations of them, they have generally focused solely on macro-categories such as place of origin, especially in languages other than English. This study investigates South Koreans’ attitudes toward North and South Koreans’ native and adopted accents and how these attitudes may relate to listeners’ categorization of the speakers. Eighty-two South Korean listeners rated recordings of three Korean speakers, two from different cities in North Korea and one from Busan, South Korea, who each read the same text in two versions: their native variety and their adopted Seoul variety. Listeners only consistently identified the Pyongyang variety as North Korean, but rated all three speakers more positively in Seoul guises than in their native guises. Additionally, when North Korean speakers were identified as being from outside South Korea, ratings were less positive. However, the Pyongyang speaker was rated more highly than the South Korean speaker on positive qualities, and qualitative data suggests that other types of speaker categorization may be relevant to attitudes, such as ‘professional’ for the Pyongyang speaker in both guises and ‘youth’ for the South Korean speaker in her Seoul guise. Thus, attitudes studies may benefit from qualitative data on speaker identification beyond the usual macro-categories, addressing the multiple categories indexed by a speech sample.

Keywords: language attitudes; Korean variety; accent identification; speaker categorization; language discrimination; North Korean defectors
Corresponding author: Yu Kyoung Shin, School of Global Studies, Hallym University, Chuncheon, Gangwon-do, Republic of Korea, E-mail:

About the authors

Yu Kyoung Shin

Yu Kyoung Shin is Assistant Professor in the School of Global Studies at Hallym University. Her research interests include corpus analysis of academic registers and disciplinary variation, as well as generative AI-based instruction, particularly for applications to L2 learning and teaching. Her recent work has appeared in Journal of English for Academic Purposes, Journal of Second Language Writing, TESOL Quarterly, System, English for Specific Purposes, Language and Intercultural Communication, Corpora, Applied Linguistics and Language Teaching Research.

Stephanie Lindemann

Stephanie Lindemann is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at Georgia State University. Her research focuses on how listeners’ attitudes or beliefs about speakers affect the success of their communication with those speakers. Her recent work has focused on developing and assessing training that improves people’s skills, strategies, and openness to communication with interlocutors from varied linguistic backgrounds. She has published in journals including Applied Linguistics, International Journal of Applied Linguistics, Journal of Second Language Pronunciation, Language in Society, and Multilingua.

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Received: 2023-03-27
Accepted: 2024-08-21
Published Online: 2024-09-19
Published in Print: 2025-05-26

© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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  5. “As a Muslim…”: on the importance of intercultural responsibility in transnational cultural exchanges
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https://doi.org/10.1515/applirev-2023-0058
Keywords for this article
language attitudes; Korean variety; accent identification; speaker categorization; language discrimination; North Korean defectors

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Research Articles
  3. (Im)mobility infrastructure and the production of the linguistic precariat
  4. Imagination and investment: unraveling academic identity in Chinese doctoral candidates’ publishing journeys in U.S. higher education
  5. “As a Muslim…”: on the importance of intercultural responsibility in transnational cultural exchanges
  6. The role of speaker categorization in South Korean attitudes toward North Korean accents
  7. Translanguaging for the construction of instructional immediacy in a Mandarin–Japanese crosslinguistic class
  8. In search of Polish in the multilingual cityscape: analysing the urban spaces of Ealing, London
  9. Precarious privilege: identity (re)construction among international students returning to South Korea
  10. Genre effects on alignment and writing quality in the continuation task by Chinese EFL learners
  11. Study abroad experiences in homestay: where complexity, dynamicity, and individuality stay
  12. Special Issue: Cognitive, Affective and Social Dimensions of Migration; Guest Editors: Fabienne Baider and Sviatlana Karpava
  13. Editorial
  14. Cognitive, affective and social dimensions of migration
  15. Research Articles
  16. On the move: social and linguistic acculturation in a small society
  17. Greek Cypriot and immigrant students’ attitudes and perceptions of acculturation, ethnic identity and self-esteem in the Republic of Cyprus
  18. Russian-speaking immigrants’ adaptation in Canada
  19. First language loss effect on bilingual autobiographical memory: examining memory phenomenology
  20. Interaction of L1 attrition, language attitudes and identity in Lithuanian diaspora
  21. Language teaching in the 21st century: incorporating culturally sustaining pedagogies for social and cognitive justice in education
  22. Conceptualising children’s linguistic rights in formal education in Greece
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