Fortifying cuteness Obstruent fortition and Aegyo

Drew Crosby, Amanda Dalola

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

The term aegyo refers to a cute style of speech in Korean with numerous reported phonetic correlates. One of these is obstruent fortition (OF). The present study examines the gender and age effects of OF across 21 romantic couples and across eight mock situations (date, workplace, family, comfort, date-planning, request, expression of love). Results revealed a significant interaction between performance of aegyo and age, such that younger participants exhibited higher rates of OF when performing aegyo than when not performing aegyo, whereas older participants did not. Results also revealed a gender effect such that women employed more OF than men, and a situation effect such that OF was more likely to occur in romantic situations, suggesting its indexicality of romantic intimacy.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)29-58
Number of pages30
JournalAsia-Pacific Language Variation
Volume9
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 24 2023

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Keywords

  • aegyo
  • cute
  • gender
  • hyeo jjalbun sori
  • Korean sociophonetics
  • obstruent fortition
  • short tongue sounds
  • sociolinguistics
  • sociophonetics
  • soft masculinity
  • variation

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