UC Berkeley

This dissertation documents a collection of sociolinguistic and sociophonetic studies of the speech of bilingual Korean Americans in California. Korean Americans are an ethnic minority in the United States whose speech patterns in Korean and English remain understudied. The goal of the studies is to begin sketching out the acoustic traits that characterize Korean American speech, insofar as the demographic can be considered to have a unified accent, or ethnolect, as well as to connect ideologies drawn from Korean Americans' own metalinguistic commentary to the patterns that emerge.

A portion of the data is drawn from a series of laboratory experiments which sampled and tested read speech in Korean and English by Korean Americans. The majority of the data comes from spontaneous bilingual speech collected in sociolinguistic interviews with forty Korean Americans residing in California. The acoustic data measured in the speech includes overall fundamental frequency (f0), formants of high back vowels, and voice onset time (VOT) of Korean consonants and affricates.

Results indicate that, on many different levels, bilingual Korean Americans are a unique speech community unto themselves. Unlike their same-age monolingual counterparts in Korea (native Koreans), they are not participating in a sound change marked by a merger of VOT in lenis and aspirated consonants and increased contrast in f0. Like many bilingual speech communities, they maintain phonological and prosodic distance between their two languages: bilingual Korean Americans speak in Korean with a higher f0 than they do in English, and they maintain cross-linguistic contrast in the articulation of their back vowels, avoiding overlap. However, Korean Americans demonstrate a unique cultural connection to the Korean language. In their own words, Korean Americans stress the importance of knowing Korean and remaining connected to their heritage, while at the same time, traditional or previously-cited definitions of what it means to be a Korean immigrant or the descendent of Korean immigrants appear to be shifting. Furthermore, most Korean Americans are in agreement that a particular way of speaking -- the Korean American ethnolect -- certainly exists, though its exact parameters remain elusive.

These studies fill in a gap in our understanding of how to situate bilingual and bicultural ethnic minorities in the United States within ongoing issues in the literature on sound change, heritage language acquisition and maintenance, and ethnolect formation. In addition, this is the broadest collection of sociolinguistic and sociophonetic studies of Korean Americans in California to date. Yet in its breadth, it becomes clear that there are many stones left unturned; it is intended that the findings of this dissertation sow the seeds for many future studies of other heritage language and minority communities.

Key words: bilingualism, heritage speaker, Korean, California English, California Vowel Shift, sound change, ethnolect, Korean American, sociophonetics, sociocultural linguistics, sociolinguistic interview