Authors scrutinize Korean perceptions of ‘short tongue’ phenomenon

LAWRENCE — While its linguistic features differ from the Valley Girl accent or uptalk in American English, Koreans have some similarly gendered perceptions of their own phenomenon known as “short-tongue.”

People tend to accept the “baby talk” aspect of short tongue much more from women — seeing it as a performance of cuteness, or aegyo — than they do for men.

Jeff Holliday, assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Kansas, and his co-author, Eun Jong Kong of Korea Aerospace University in Seoul, published a research paper titled “The Role of Gender in the Social Evaluation of Korean Short Tongue Pronunciation” in the journal Language and Speech.

The scholars surveyed 474 South Korean adults about what constitutes “short tongue” and how they feel about it.

Holliday said he noticed a popular South Korean discourse about short tongue soon after moving to Seoul in the early 2000s.

“I heard about people getting tongue surgery in order to have better English pronunciation because they thought they were struggling and that it would help,” Holliday said. “There is so much pressure on Korean children to learn English.”

And while Holliday traced the earliest mention of the phenomenon to a 1957 Korean dictionary, he said the new study is the first to characterize the various pronunciation variants thought of as short tongue. It divides them into three main linguistic tropes — fronting, affriction and stopping — that involve varying pronunciations of the “s” sound.

“Then crucially,” he said, “we wanted to know, ‘What does gender have to do with this?’

“There are whole studies on people’s perception of aegyo. There are situations in which people don’t think it’s appropriate to do, but in general it’s not bad, and sometimes it’s very positive. Short tongue is the most prominent linguistic element of aegyo, but when you ask people about short tongue independently of aegyo, it turns out that people feel very negatively about it. This was surprising, but we realized it was because short tongue — these certain pronunciation variants — are interpreted very differently depending on the specific pronunciation and who is doing it.”

The difference in gendered responses was most pronounced, Holliday said, when answering questions about the variation known as affriction, which is often likened to baby talk. It involves pronouncing the “s” sound like a “j.”

“Men don’t find it too annoying when women do it, but hate it when men do it,” Holliday said. “Women, on the other hand do not feel positively about it no matter who is doing it, but do feel differently about specific pronunciations.”

When it came to the variation known as fronting, in which the “s” sound is pronounced like “th,” Holliday said, the second most popular reaction from a multiple-choice list was “worried.”

“If you’re fronting ... that’s a concern for some people,” Holliday said, “because that’s not cute.”

He added that such fronting would more likely be seen as a possible speech impediment. 

Holliday said the authors are not trying to pass judgment on Korean people’s views of short tongue, merely to characterize the current state of them.

“People are entitled to their preferences about all sorts of things, including pronunciation,” the KU scholar said. “But we need to recognize that they are preferences and not objective facts. There is no science to support the claim that a certain pronunciation is bad or annoying. So by systematically studying people’s responses, we can better understand the factors that drive popular discourse around pronunciation habits, including English phenomena like uptalk.”