Home Linguistics & Semiotics A two-decade-interval variation in vowel insertion after word-final English and French postvocalic plosives in Korean adaptation: A sociolinguistic account
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A two-decade-interval variation in vowel insertion after word-final English and French postvocalic plosives in Korean adaptation: A sociolinguistic account

  • Hyunsoon Kim EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: August 1, 2017
Linguistics Vanguard
From the journal Linguistics Vanguard Volume 3 Issue 1

Abstract:

We investigated whether variation in vowel insertion after word-final English and French postvocalic plosives in Korean adaptation has changed at a two-decade interval by collecting English and French loanword data in the early 1990s and the year 2011. Our data survey has revealed that the overall frequency of final vowel insertion and that of variable insertion and/or no vowel insertion are significantly decreased and increased, respectively, in the 2011 data, no matter whether the plosives are English or French. The data survey is supported by a recent perception study wherein young Koreans have no difference in vowel insertion after English and French plosives, regardless of whether they are released or not, compared to old Koreans. Based on these results, we propose that more direct contact with English than two decades ago has led to more exposure to its spoken usages and that less direct contact with French has led word-final French postvocalic plosives to be perceived more like their English counterparts in vowel insertion by Koreans. It is concluded that the present study suggests the role of sociolinguistic environments over time in loanword adaptation.

Keywords: diachronic variation; Korean adaptation; sociolinguistic environments; vowel insertion

Funding statement: This work is supported by a 2014 Hongik University Research Fund.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my sincere thanks to Jihyun Chung who helped with data collection and to Aditi Lahiri and two anonymous reviewers for comments and feedback. Earlier versions of the present study were presented at the conference in honor of Annie Rialland at Sorbonne University in 2014 and at the 18th ICPhS conference held at Glasgow, England in 2015. All errors remain my own.

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Received: 2015-12-8
Accepted: 2016-10-3
Published Online: 2017-8-1

© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2016-0076
Keywords for this article
diachronic variation; Korean adaptation; sociolinguistic environments; vowel insertion

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Editorial
  2. Editorial
  3. Phonetics & Phonology
  4. Acoustic correlates of word stress: A cross-linguistic survey
  5. A two-decade-interval variation in vowel insertion after word-final English and French postvocalic plosives in Korean adaptation: A sociolinguistic account
  6. Methodological issues in the study of word stress correlates
  7. Morphology & Syntax
  8. From the past into the present: From case frames to semantic frames
  9. Valency and expectation in Bantu applicatives
  10. Semantics & Pragmatics
  11. Semantic values as latent parameters: Testing a fixed threshold hypothesis for cardinal readings of few & many
  12. The Role of Prosody in the Identification of Persian Sentence Types: Declarative or Wh-question?
  13. Language Acquisition & Language Learning
  14. Individual differences in second language speech perception across tasks and contrasts: The case of English vowel contrasts by Korean learners
  15. Language Documentation & Typology
  16. Topological Relations in Pohnpeian
  17. Psycholinguistics & Neurolinguistics
  18. Incremental parsing in a continuous dynamical system: sentence processing in Gradient Symbolic Computation
  19. Sociolinguistics & Anthropological Linguistics
  20. Frequency effects over the lifespan: a case study of Attenborough’s r’s
  21. Is like like like?: Evaluating the same variant across multiple variables
  22. The linguist’s Drosophila: Experiments in language change
  23. Seseo, ceceo, and distinción in Andalusian Spanish: Free variation or sociolinguistic variation?
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