Yi, So Young. 2017. “Social and stylistic variation in vowel raising in Seoul Korean”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 25(3). 165~197. The purpose of this study is to examine extralinguistic factors that influence vowel raising of /o/ in constituent-final -ko and -to in Seoul Korean, focusing mainly on the influence of social variations and stylistic variations on this phenomenon. The Sociolinguistic interview data showed that older speakers used the most raised variant of /o/ in the AP-medial position, which is evidence for age-grading for the following reasons: (i) the linguistic marketplace, which is an important concept in age-grading, supports this idea because older people use the non-standard form of /o/, which is the raised variant, after they leave the workforce, and (ii) the unraised variant does not push out the raised variant, but rather, they co-exist. In addition, stylistic variations related to the formality of the speech setting and the solidarity between interactants affect the vowel, leading to vowel raising (i) in casual speech situation and (ii) in interaction with an addressee with whom the speaker is intimate; these trends are especially salient for younger speakers.

• Yi, So Young(Hankuk University of Foreign Studies)