The phonology of the Korean language covers the language's phonemic, or distinct and meaningful, sounds (19 consonants and 7 vowels in the standard Seoul dialect) and the rules governing how those sounds interact with each other. This article is a technical description of the phonetics and phonology of Korean. Unless otherwise noted, statements in this article refer to the South Korean standard language based on the Seoul dialect.
Consonants Korean has 19 consonant phonemes.
For each plosive and affricate, there is a three-way contrast between unvoiced segments, which are distinguished as plain, tense, and aspirated. The "plain" segments, sometimes referred to as "lax" or "lenis", are considered to be the more "basic" or unmarked members of the Korean obstruent series. The "plain" segments are also distinguished from the tense and aspirated phonemes by changes in vowel quality, including a relatively lower pitch of the following vowel. The "tense" segments, also referred to as "fortis", "hard", or "glottalized", have eluded precise description and have been the subject of considerable phonetic investigation. In the Korean alphabet as well as all widely used romanization systems for Korean, they are represented as doubled plain segments: , , , . As it was suggested from the Middle Korean spelling, the tense consonants came from the initial consonant clusters sC-, pC-, and psC-. The "aspirated" segments are characterized by aspiration, a burst of air accompanied by the delayed onset of voicing.
Korean syllable structure is maximally CGVC, where G is a glide . (There is a unique off-glide diphthong in the character 의 that combines the sounds and creating ). Any consonant except may occur initially, but only may occur finally. Sequences of two consonants may occur between vowels.
+ Consonant phonemes Bilabial Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal Nasal Stop/Affricate plain ~ tense ~ aspirated ~ Fricative plain/aspirated tense Sonorant ~
+ Example words for consonant phonemes IPA ExampleKoreanPronunciationTranslation 'fire' or 'light' 'horn' 'grass' or 'glue' 'water' or 'liquid' 'moon' or 'month' 'daughter' 'mask' or 'trouble' 'day' or 'blade' 'to sleep' 'to squeeze' or 'to be salty' 'to kick' or 'to be cold' 'energy' 'talent' or 'meal' 'height' 'room' 'flesh' 'uncooked grains of rice' 'wind' or 'wish' 'foot' 'to do'
Plain are voiced between sonorants (including all vowels and certain consonants) but voiceless elsewhere. Among younger generations, they may be just as aspirated as in initial position; the primary difference is that vowels following the plain consonants carry low tone.
Aspirated are strongly aspirated, more so than English voiceless stops. They generally do not undergo intervocalic voicing, but a 2020 study reports that it still occurs in around 10 to 15% of cases. It is more prevalent among older male speakers who have aspirated stops voiced in as much as 28% of cases.
Tense The IPA diacritic , resembling a subscript double straight quotation mark, shown here with a placeholder circle, is used to denote the tensed consonants . Its official use in the Extensions to the IPA is for strong articulation, but is used in literature in the context of Korean phonology for faucalized voice. The Korean consonants also have elements of stiff voice, but it is not yet known how typical that is of faucalized consonants. Sometimes the tense consonants are marked with an apostrophe, , but that is not IPA usage; in the IPA, the apostrophe indicates ejective consonants. Some works use full-size or small before tensed consonants; this notation is generally used to denote pre-glottalization. An asterisk after a tensed consonant is also used in literature.
They are produced with a partially constricted glottis and additional subglottal pressure in addition to tense vocal tract walls, laryngeal lowering, or other expansion of the larynx. An alternative analysis proposes that the "tensed" series of sounds are (fundamentally) regular voiceless, unaspirated consonants: the "lax" sounds are voiced consonants that become devoiced initially, and the primary distinguishing feature between word-initial "lax" and "tensed" consonants is that initial lax sounds cause the following vowel to assume a low-to-high pitch contour, a feature reportedly associated with voiced consonants in many Asian languages (such as Shanghainese), whereas tensed (and also aspirated) consonants are associated with a uniformly high pitch.
Vowels before tense consonants (as well as aspirated) tend to be shorter than before lax stops.
The Gyeongsang dialect is known for realization of tense as plain .
Fricatives does not occur in final position, though the sound does occur at the end of non-final syllables, where it affects the following consonant. (See below.) Intervocalically, it is realized as voiced , and after voiced consonants it is either or silent.
The analysis of as phonologically plain or aspirated has been a source of controversy in the literature. Similarly to plain stops, it shows moderate aspiration word-initially but no aspiration word-medially. It also often undergoes intervocalic voicing. But similar to aspirated stops, it triggers high pitch in the following vowel.
Word-initial aspiration, intervocalic voicing, and higher pitch of the following vowels are shared qualities in Korean fricatives and .
Sonorants Sonorants resemble vowels in the sense that plain stops become voiced between a sonorant or a vowel and another vowel.
tend to be denasalized word-initially towards , and may be perceived as by native English speakers. In this article, these allophones are transcribed .
does not occur in initial position, reflected in the way the Hangul jamo has a different pronunciation in the initial position to the final position. These were distinguished when Hangul was created, with the jamo with the upper dot and the jamo without the upper dot; these were then conflated and merged in both the North Korean and South Korean standards. can technically occur syllable-initially, as in , which is written as , but pronounced as .
is an alveolar flap between vowels or between a vowel and an . It is or at the end of a word, before a consonant other than , or next to another ; in these contexts, it is palatalized to before and before palatal consonant allophones. There is free variation at the beginning of a word, where this phoneme tends to become before most vowels and silent before , but it is commonly in English loanwords. Geminate is realized as , or as before .
In native Korean words, does not occur word initially, unlike in Chinese loans (Sino-Korean vocabulary). In South Korea, it is silent in initial position before and , pronounced before other vowels, and pronounced only in compound words after a vowel. The prohibition on word-initial is called the initial sound rule. Initial is spelled with in North Korea, but is often pronounced the same way as it is in South Korea.
"labour" () – North Korea: (), South Korea: () "history" () – North Korea: (), South Korea: ()
This rule also extends to in many native and all Sino-Korean words, which is also lost before initial and in South Korean; again, North Korean preserves the phoneme there.
"female" () – North Korea: (), South Korea: ()
In both countries, initial in words of foreign origin other than Chinese is pronounced . Very old speakers may pronounce word-initial as even in Western loanwords, e.g. in "lighter" .
When pronounced as an alveolar flap , is sometimes derived from through a historical lenition process, such as in the verb which turns into .
The features of consonants are summarized in the following table.
+ Features of consonants Consonant class Voice Tension Aspiration Pitch of following vowel Sonorants yes lenis no low Plain intervocalically lenis slightheavy (word-initially) low intervocalically(if not silent) lenis (yes) high possible lenis slightheavy (word-initially) high Aspirated no fortis heavy high Tense no fortis no high
Clusters Morphemes may also end in CC clusters, which are both expressed only when they are followed by a vowel. When the morpheme is not suffixed, one of the consonants is not expressed; if there is a , which cannot appear in final position, it will be that. Otherwise it will be a coronal consonant (with the exception of , sometimes), and if the sequence is two coronals, the voiceless one () will drop, and or will remain. either reduces to (as in 짧다 "to be short") or to (as in 밟다 "to step"); 여덟 "eight" is always pronounced 여덜 even when followed by a vowel-initial particle. Thus, no sequence reduces to in final position.
{| class="wikitable" |- style="text-align: center;" ! Sequence ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! colspan="2" | ! ! ! |- style="text-align: center;" ! Medial allophone
| colspan="2" |
|- style="text-align: center;" ! Final allophone | colspan="2" | | colspan="2" | | colspan="4" | | colspan="3" |
When such a sequence is followed by a consonant, the same reduction takes place, but a trace of the lost consonant may remain in its effect on the following consonant. The effects are the same as in a sequence between vowels: an elided obstruent will leave the third consonant fortis, if it is a stop, and an elided will leave it aspirated. Most conceivable combinations do not actually occur; a few examples are = , = , = , = , = , = ; also = , as has no effect on a following , and = , with the dropping out.
When the second and third consonants are homorganic obstruents, they merge, becoming fortis or aspirate, and, depending on the word and a preceding , might not elide: is .
An elided has no effect: = , = , = , = , = , = , = , = , = , = , = .
Positional allophones Korean consonants have three principal positional allophones: initial, medial (voiced), and final (checked). The initial form is found at the beginning of phonological words. The medial form is found in voiced environments, intervocalically (immediately between vowels), and after a voiced consonant such as or . The final form is found in checked environments such as at the end of a phonological word or before an obstruent consonant such as or . Nasal consonants (, , ) do not have noticeable positional allophones beyond initial denasalization, and cannot appear in this position.
The table below is out of alphabetical order to make the relationships between the consonants explicit:
Phoneme Initial allophone Medial allophone ~n/a Final allophone colspan="2"
All obstruents (stops, affricates, fricatives) become stops with no audible release at the end of a word: all coronals collapse to , all labials to , and all velars to . Final is a lateral or .
Palatalization The vowel that most affects consonants is , which, along with its semivowel homologue , palatalizes and to alveolo-palatal and for most speakers (see North–South differences in the Korean language).
are pronounced in Seoul, but typically pronounced in Pyongyang. Similarly, are palatalized as before in Seoul. In Pyongyang they remain unchanged. This pronunciation may be also found in Seoul Korean among some speakers, especially before back vowels.
As noted above, initial is silent in this palatalizing environment, at least in South Korea. Similarly, an underlying or at the end of a morpheme becomes a phonemically palatalized affricate or , respectively, when followed by a word or suffix beginning with or (it becomes indistinguishable from an underlying ), but that does not happen within native Korean words such as "where?".
is more affected by vowels, often becoming an affricate when followed by or : , . The most variable consonant is , which becomes a palatal before or , a velar before , and a bilabial before , and .
+ Allophones of consonants before vowels ㅅ ㅆ ㄷ + suffix ㅌ + suffix ㅋ ㅎ word-initially ㅎ intervocalically ᄅ ᄅ geminated