Merger-in-Progress of Tonal Classes in Masan/Changwon Korean

Abstract

In Masan/Changwon Korean, a dialect in the South Gyeongsang (Kyungsang) Province, two lexical tonal classes—Final and Medial-Double (MDouble)—have similar phonetic realizations. In data collection, three sets of materials were recorded from younger speakers: (i) words with particles, (ii) compounds and (iii) sentences with contrastive focus, each set containing either Final or M-Double words. The results revealed that the two classes were indeed under a merger-in-progress in younger speakers. In addition, betweenspeaker and between-condition (material set) differences were found on how classes merge. The between-condition difference is a challenge for theories on lexical tonal representations.