I had been brought up in Seoul and Gyeonggi Province, and unfortunately, I didn’t have many opportunities to learn about regional varieties. All my close family members speak Seoul Korean — my Mum’s family are from Uljin, North Gyeongsang, but my Mum was brought up in Seoul — and at school, most kids spoke Seoul Korean. At University, again, my friends used Seoul Korean. But one day I heard one of my close friends speaking on the phone to her Mum, switching from Seoul Korean to her native dialect! That was a revelation. The world seems to have changed since when I was a student, and I see that more and more dialects are used in Korean TV shows. But in the past, perhaps, there was a stronger expectation than there is now, for the ‘standard’ Seoul dialect to be used as the prestigious official language for education, media, etc.
I confess that I, despite being a native Korean speaker and trained linguist, find it difficult to understand and analyse Korean dialects. But the regional variation is one of the things that make a language so fascinating to study, and it’s not fair to promote one dialect over others. Learning different dialects gives us insights on language as a whole, language change, cultural richness, etc., so let’s embrace and learn about diversity.
Let’s watch this video showing people from Gyeongsang and Seoul reading ‘blueberry smoothie’:
The first bunch of people are probably from Gyeongsang. I immediately recognise that the second bunch speak Seoul Korean. The melodic differences are subtle but obvious.
However, characterising what Gyeongsang Korean is like is not simple. Different areas in Gyeongsang have different dialects (for instance, the Busan dialect is different from the Ulsan dialect, although these cities are not far from each other), and for prosodic typology, well, it will take someone’s lifetime to get it sorted. See Akira Utsuki’s presentation at the 8th International Conference on Phonology and Morphology (June 2022, online conference).
First, Akira speaks about the challenges in studying Korean prosody. I agree that we need large-scale fieldwork and corpora with *voice data*! There are many Korean journal papers reporting the pitch pattern within a word (e.g. high-low or low-high) across dialects, but they are usually based on the author’s intuition. It’s common to see people disagreeing with what’s reported, and it’s hard to know where the disagreement comes from, whether it’s to do with the researcher’s perception or more systematic variation.
Second, there is a nice map of Korea on page 18. The map shows that the Eastern part of the peninsula has ‘tonal’ dialects. There are high mountains which are not shown on the map. Simply put, the Korean dialects tend not to be ‘tonal’ to the left of the vertical mountain ranges, but ‘tonal’ to the right.
Then things get complicated from page 19. You need some background knowledge to fully understand the presentation from here. For discussing word-level (lexical) prosody in linguistics, we often talk about lexical stress (typically in West Germanic languages such as English, German, etc.), tone, and pitch accent systems. Mandarin Chinese is probably the most frequently cited example of tone languages. Each syllable has a distinctive pitch movement; depending on whether you say ‘ma’ with a high, rising, dipping, falling pitch, ‘ma’ can be a different word: ‘mother’, ‘hemp’, ‘horse’, and ‘scold’, respectively. What’s going on in Japanese is different from the Chinese case in that the pitch movement occurs over a whole word, rather than a syllable. For instance, ‘hashi’ means different things (‘chopsticks’, ‘bridge’, and ‘edge’) depending on where the pitch peak is.
However, importantly, language typology is never so neat and clean. (For some serious discussion, see Larry M. Hyman (2009), How (not) to do phonological typology: the case of pitch-accent, Language Sciences, Volume 31: 213-238.) And Akira’s presentation says that Gyeongsang dialects have a hybrid of the lexical tone and pitch accent systems. Moreover, there is some change going on in their lexical prosody.
To be continued… 🙂
Korean Linguistics 