The Role of Gender in the Social Evaluation of Korean Short Tongue Pronunciation

Abstract

Short tongue pronunciation (STP) refers to an enregistered set of pronunciation variants in Korean that is popularly thought to result from underdeveloped speech articulation, having a physically shorter tongue, or intentionally imitating such a pronunciation. Because these explanations can be tied to children’s speech, there is a potential role of gender in mediating the social evaluation of STP. To investigate this, we carried out a between-subjects (n = 474) survey on beliefs and attitudes toward STP produced by adult men and women. The results confirmed that STP is a familiar concept to Korean speakers, primarily referring to the stopping, affrication, fronting, and tensification of obstruents, resembling certain child-like speech patterns. While STP was generally perceived negatively, the gender of both the listener and the imagined talker influenced its evaluation. Stopping and affrication were more frequently associated with female talkers, and male listeners perceived female STP, but not male STP, as cute in certain sociopragmatic contexts. In contrast, fronting, which was more frequently associated with male talkers, was regarded as an innate speech deficit and consistently evaluated negatively, regardless of talker gender. These findings highlight the complex interplay of sociophonetic perception and gendered expectations in Korean.