earticle

영어

This paper sought to analyze the frequency of appearance of final consonants in Korean in order to provide basic data for teaching foreign learners pronunciation. In this paper, the audio materials contained in the elementary textbooks, ‘Korean as a foreign language 1, 2’ were transcribed into Hangul and the frequencies of appearance of phonemes were analyzed using SynKDP ver 1.6. The results showed that the frequency of final consonants out of all phonemes was approximately 14%. Of the final consonants, 88% were shown to be sonorants /m, n, ŋ, I/ and 12% were shown to be obstruents /p˥, t˥, k˥/. The frequency of appearance of nasal sounds /m, n, ŋ/ was shown to be quite high at approximately 66%. The ratio of obstruents that became nasal sounds by the nasal assimilation, was shown to be approximately 16%. Lateral /l/ sound showed a frequency of 21% and only 1% of them were identified to be the result of the lateralization of obstruents. Meanwhile, approximately 74% of obstruent final consonants involved fortition, and only approximately 26% were pure obstruent final consonants. Finally, cases where the aspiratization occurred after neutralization were found in only 57 words out of 5,577 words in total. Pedagogical implications are discussed.