Korean Ethnic Orientation and Regional Linguistic Variability in the Multiethnic Context of Houston

Abstract

Few studies in variationist sociolinguistics have investigated the Englishes of speakers of Asian heritage in the United States, and even fewer have looked at the correlation between ethnicity and linguistic variability among them. To address these limitations in the literature, this study offers an investigation of ethnic Koreans in the multiethnic context of Houston, Texas. The data come from sociolinguistic interviews with 15 Koreans of first- and second-generation immigrant backgrounds. Of particular interest to the chapter is the phonetic variation and sound changes of these Korean interviewees. Specifically, the chapter examines the fronted production of the back vowel GOAT (i.e., the pronunciation of the vowel in the word goat further forward in the mouth)—a dialect feature known as GOAT-fronting. The findings reveal how these speakers’ orientations to the Korean ethnic group and generational differences influence their linguistic behavior.