The Merger of /e/ and /ɛ/ in Seoul Korean Tracing Speakers Born from the 1930s to the 1960s

Abstract

It is well-known that the vowel /ɛ/ has already been merged into /e/ in Seoul Korean, but two questions still remain unanswered: when this sound change began and who led it. To answer these questions, we extracted speech data of 66 speakers born between the 1930s and the 1970s from The Speech Corpus of Reading-Style Standard Korean. In total, 1056 vowel tokens were selected from eight target words containing each vowel from each speaker, and the F1 and F2 values of each target vowel were manually measured. Results suggest that female speakers born before or in the 1940s initiated the vowel merger, which began to be transmitted and diffused into males’ speech approximately a generation (30 years) later. The results of the study hinted at the direction of the merger; the two vowels were first merged in the F2 space, followed by a further neutralization toward F1. The findings of the present study support the general tendency of female-led sound changes and advance further understanding of the merger of /e/ and /ɛ/ in Seoul Korean by answering the two unresolved questions.