Comparative analysis of South Korean and North Korean vowels: A pilot study
Jung‐Ah Lee, Kaori Idemaru, Charlotte R. Vaughn · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2018
This study investigates cardinal vowels of standard North Korean and South Korean. Prior reports have suggested that North and South Korean vowels have undergone changes after decades of relative isolation. This poster reports a pilot study investigating the ways in which the language standards of North and South Korea are similar and different by examining the speech of newscasters from each country. Acoustic analysis of the speech data suggested that North Korean vowels [ɛ] and [æ] were produced in the higher position relative to the South Korean counterparts, and the back vowels [ʌ] and [o] showed overlapping formant values unlike the South Korean counterparts. The perception experiment suggested that South Korean listeners could not accurately identify the North Korean [ʌ] and [o]. These results indicate that there may be interesting differences across North Korean and South Korean vowels.