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Article published In: Korean Linguistics
Vol. 21:1 (2025) ► pp.61–100

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Sound symbolism in Korean names

The interplay between cross-linguistic and language-specific patterns

 | Oklahoma State University
 | University of Toronto | University of Toronto Scarborough
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 23 May 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/kl.23008.sul
Abstract
Sound symbolism is the idea that meaning can be encoded at a submorphemic level. Recent research argues that it is more pervasive than previously assumed. We contribute to this line of work by investigating cross-linguistic and language-specific patterns in Korean given names, finding that patterns match those found in other languages, except in the case of vowel height where there may be an interaction with Korean-specific sound symbolism. In native sound symbolic words, dark (higher) vowels are associated with largeness and light (lower) vowels, with smallness, contrary to the cross-linguistic vowel height-size symbolism where higher vowels are associated with smallness. We find that light-dark sound symbolism appears to override vowel height symbolism, but only for light or dark vowels. Our study adds to the growing body of literature demonstrating the presence of sound symbolism in given names and suggests that tensions between cross-linguistic tendencies and language-specific patterns manifest in them.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Sound symbolism and given names
  • 3.Korean phonology
    • 3.1Sounds and phonological processes in Korean
    • 3.2Vowel patterns in the Korean sound symbolic vocabulary
  • 4.Methods
    • 4.1Data collection
    • 4.2Statistical analysis
  • 5.Results
  • 6.Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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