Cover not available
Article published In:
Asia-Pacific Language Variation
Vol. 9:1 (2023) ► pp.29–58

Fortifying cuteness

Obstruent fortition and Aegyo

ORCID logo | University of South Carolina
| University of Minnesota

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.

Keywords: Korean sociophonetics, aegyo , obstruent fortition, hyeo jjalbun sori , short tongue sounds, sociophonetics, cute, gender, soft masculinity, sociolinguistics, variation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Aegyo
    • 1.2Obstruent fortition in aegyo
    • 1.3Research questions
  • 2.Methods
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Stimuli
    • 2.3Procedure
    • 2.4Measurements
    • 2.5Statistical analysis
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Descriptive results
    • 3.2Statistical results
      • 3.2.1Statistical model
    • 3.3Lexical effects
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 24 July 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/aplv.22005.cro
References
Agha, Asif
(2003) The social life of cultural value. Language & communication, 23(3–4), 231–273. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Boersma, Paul & Weenink, David
(2021) Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 6.1.53Google Scholar
Brown, Lucien
(2017) “Nwuna׳ s body is so sexy”: Pop culture and the chronotopic formulations of kinship terms in Korean. Discourse, Context & Media, 15 1, 1–10. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Calder, Jeremy & Wheeler, Rebecca
(2022) Is Zoom viable for sociophonetic research? A comparison of in-person and online recordings for sibilant analysis. Linguistics Vanguard, 1–14. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Calder, Jeremy, Wheeler, Rebecca, Adams, Sarah, Amarelo, Daniel, Arnold-Murray, Katherine, Bai, , Salvador, Nadine
(2022) Is Zoom viable for sociophonetic research? A comparison of in-person and online recordings for vocalic analysis. Linguistics Vanguard, 1–18. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Coupland, Nikolas
(2001) Dialect stylization in radio talk. Language in society, 30(3), 345–375. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Eckert, Penelope
(2005, January). Variation, convention, and social meaning. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. Oakland CA.
(2008) Variation and the indexical field 1. Journal of sociolinguistics, 12(4), 453–476. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2012) Three waves of variation study: The emergence of meaning in the study of sociolinguistic variation. Annual review of Anthropology, 411, 87–100. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Freeman, Valerie, & De Decker, Paul
(2021) Remote sociophonetic data collection: Vowels and nasalization over video conferencing apps. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 149(2), 1211–1223. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Han, Ae Jin
(2016) The aesthetics of cuteness in Korean pop music (Doctoral dissertation, University of Sussex).
Holliday, Jeffrey, & Kong Eeunjong
(2018, May). Beliefs and attitudes regarding “short tongue” pronunciation in Korean. Paper presented at the The Korean Society of Speech Sciences 2018 Spring Research Symposium, Daejeon, South Korea.
Jang, Hayeun
(2021) How cute do I sound to you?: Gender and age effects in the use and evaluation of Korean baby-talk register, Aegyo. Language Sciences, 831, 1–19. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Johnson, Keith
(2011) Acoustic and Auditory Phonetics. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Jung, Sun
(2011) Korean masculinities and transcultural consumption: Yonsama, Rain, Oldboy, K-Pop idols. Hong Kong University Press.Google Scholar
Kim, Yaerang
(2019, December 14). ‘Jebal Gyeongsangdo Namjarang Gyeolhonhaci Maseyo’ [Please Do Not Marry a Gyeongsangdo Man]. The Korean Economic Daily. Retrieved from [URL]
Kuznetsova, Alexandra, Brockhoff, Per B., & Christensen, Rune H. B.
(2017) lmerTest package: tests in linear mixed effects models. Journal of statistical software, 821, 1–26. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ladefoged, Peter, & Johnson, Keith
(2010) A course in phonetics (6th ed.). Cengage learning.Google Scholar
Manietta, Joseph Bazil
(2015) Transnational masculinities: The distributive performativity of gender in Korean boy bands (Master’s thesis, University of Colorado at Boulder).
Moon, Kyuwon
(2013) Phrase final position as a site of social meaning: Phonetic variation among young Seoul women (Unpublished master’s thesis, Stanford University).
(2017) Phrase final position as a site of social meaning: Phonetic variation among young Seoul women (Doctoral dissertation, Stanford University).
(2018) The social meaning of rising-falling tone in a ‘reality’ TV show. Sahoi Eoneohak [Sociolinguistics], 26(3), 89–116. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Moon, Seungsook
(2001) 4. The Production and Subversion of Hegemonic Masculinity: Reconfiguring Gender Hierarchy in Contemporary South Korea. In Under construction (pp. 79–114). University of Hawaii Press.Google Scholar
Ochs, Elinor
(1992) Indexing gender. Rethinking context: language as an interactive phenomenon, ed. by Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin, 335–58.Google Scholar
Podesva, Robert J.
(2007) Phonation type as a stylistic variable: The use of falsetto in constructing a persona. Journal of sociolinguistics, 11(4), 478–504. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Puzar, Aljosa, & Hong, Yewon
(2018) Korean cuties: Understanding performed winsomeness (aegyo) in South Korea. The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 19 (4), 333–349. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
R Core Team
(2018) R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria.Google Scholar
Schertz, Jessamyn, Kang, Yoonjung, Kochetov, Alexei, Kong, Eunjong, & Han, Sungwoo
(2015) Dialectal variability in place and manner of Korean affricates. In ICPhS.Google Scholar
Shin, Jiyeong
(2015) Vowels and consonants. The handbook of Korean linguistics, 3–21. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Shin, Jiyoung, Kiaer, Jieun, & Cha, Jaeeun
(2012) The sounds of Korean. Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Starr, Rebecca Lurie
(2015) Sweet voice: The role of voice quality in a Japanese feminine style. Language in Society, 1–34. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Starr, Rebecca Lurie, Wang, Tianxiao, & Go, Christian
(2020) Sexuality vs. sensuality: The multimodal construction of affective stance in Chinese ASMR performances. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 24(4), 492–513. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Strong, Shelby
(2012) Too Cute for Words: An Investigation of Prosody’s Role in the Construction of Aegyo as a Speech Style. Washington University Undergraduate Research Digest, 8(1), 29–43. Retrieved from [URL]
Wardhaugh, Ronald, & Fuller, Janet M.
(2015) An introduction to sociolinguistics. Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
YTN
(2015, July 7). ‘Gyeongsangdo Namcanun Jeongmal Muddukddukhanga? … Tonggyelo Hwagin!’ [Are Gyeongsangdo Men Really Blunt? … Statistically Confirmed!]. YTN. Retrieved from [URL]