IPA transcription of Korean

This site uses a custom system for transcribing Standard Korean in the
International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). If we were transcribing English,
French, or German, we would be better off adhering to the traditional
transcriptions which are familiar to many learners of these languages due to
their use in teaching materials and reference works. Such broadly agreed
systems do not yet exist for Korean, however.
Furthermore, the system currently used by the English-language
Wikipedia is unsatisfactory for non-Korean speakers in that it transcribes
word-initial plain (also lax or lenis) consonants with simple voiceless
symbols in the IPA. This gives the wrong idea about these sounds for those
who are used to seeing the same symbols for sounds that are much closer
to the tense (or tenuis) consonants in Korean. For instance, the
Wikipedia system would write bul, which starts with a plain sound, as
[pul], and ppul, which starts with a tense sound, as [pul], employing the
Extended IPA diacritic for strong articulation in the latter case. However,
[pul] as pronounced in most languages with voiceless unaspirated stops
(e.g. French and Italian, though less so with Spanish where the stops tend to
be somewhat weaker) would sound almost exactly like ppul in Korean, not
bul. Not only is the plain sound much weaker (the duration between the
closure and the release is quite shorter and is accompanied by a much
smaller build-up of air pressure compared to the tense or aspirated sounds),
it is also usually weakly aspirated. Since the aspirated series is written with
the aspiration diacritic , e.g. pul [pul], a voiceless symbol in the same
system without the aspiration diacritic such as [p] risks being interpreted as
a completely unaspirated sound, conforming to the usual practice in
transcribing languages where aspiration is contrastive (e.g. Indo-Aryan
languages, Chinese, and Thai, where the sound written [p] is completely
unaspirated).
This choice of symbols gives the mistaken impression that the Korean tense
consonants are much more strongly articulated than voiceless unaspirated
consonants in other languages, when in fact they are of comparable
strength and it is the Korean plain consonants that are much more weakly
articulated. In our system, we write bul as /bul/ [bul] (more on the
phonetic transcription below) and ppul as /pul/ [pul], adopting the
alternative analysis that the tense series is fundamentally regular voiceless
and that the plain series consists of fundamentally voiced consonants that
undergo devoicing initially.[1]
We use both a phonemic transcription of Korean that uses one IPA symbol
for each phoneme, and a phonetic transcription that indicates what we
judge to be the most pertinent ways in which the phonemes are pronounced
differently depending on the position. We enclose the phonemic
transcription in slashes (/ /) and the phonetic transcription in square
brackets ([ ]).

We write the non-tense sibilant s as /z/ in order to show that it has

characteristics of both the plain series and the aspirated series. We use the
ring diacritic that indicates devoicing even in the phonemic transcription
because it is voiceless in all positions in normal speech. The tense ss is
simply written /s/.
1. Phonemic transcription
The following symbols are used for the phonemes of Korean:
vowels: a e o u y i
glides: j w
consonants: m b p p n d t t l z s k k h
The correspondence with hangul (Korean alphabet) orthography is as
follows:
a / / ja / j / / e / j / je / o / wa / w / / jo
/ u / w / we / y / ju / / i / i
/ k / n / d / t / l / m / b / p / z / s / / /
/ / k / t / p / h
There is also the length mark () to indicate lexical length.
Korean dictionaries often indicate the pronunciation of words by giving
a phonetic respelling that uses the length mark () when necessary. For
instance, Daegwallyeong (we use the Revised Romanization of
Korean in general except for names and words widely known under a
different romanization) may be given the pronunciation respelling [ -],
that is, [ ] with replaced with a hyphen to conserve space since it
doesnt change from the original spelling. Using the above correspondence
list, we can convert [ ] to /d.wal.lj/ (the phonetic transcription is
[d.wal.lj] as we will see below). Our phonemic transcription is therefore
based on the surface pronunciation, but when we want to transcribe the
underlying morphophonemic representation that is closer to the Korean
spelling, we can enclose them in pipes (| |) and write |d.wan-lj| (with
the hyphen here representing the morpheme boundary).
Following the phonetic respelling used in Korean dictionaries, we represent
stops in syllable codas, where phonation contrasts are neutralized, as plain
stops /b, d, /. This is supported by the normal enchanement rules in Korean
across word boundarieswhen stops in syllable codas are followed by a
vowel-initial independent word, they surface as plain stops.
In standard pronunciation, the glide /j/ in /je/ may be dropped if it is
immediately preceded by a consonant other than /l/ in the underlying
syllable. The glide // in /i/ may also be dropped when it doesnt begin a
word. We italicize such glides in order to indicate the optional omission.

[-/-] sigye /zi.je/ [i.je]

[-/-] juui /u.i/ [u.i]
When the s inserted in writing between the elements of compound words
(called saisiot in Korean) is optionally pronounced as /d/, we write it
as a subscript.
[ / ] sinaetga /zi.nd.ka/ [i.nk.ka, -nt-]
[-/-] isatjim /i.zad.im/ [i.zat.im]
[/] chotdae /od.t/ [ot.t]
2. Phonetic transcription
The plain stops /b, d, / and the plain affricate // are devoiced unless they
are surrounded by voiced sounds. So word-initial /b, d, , / are devoiced,
but these do not merge into either /p, t, k, / or /p, t, k, / as they are
produced with much less force and the following vowel usually begins with a
lower pitch. They are somewhat like whispered versions of /b, d, , / and
can be described as lenis voiceless consonants. The IPA does not provide a
specific way of notating lenis voiceless consonants, but we can follow the
convention often used for some Germanic languages (e.g. Swiss German
dialects) and write these as [b, d, , ] (however, the similar notation does
not imply that the pronunciations of lenis consonants are the same in the
different languages, because the exact phonetic nature of the contrast with
fortis or tense consonants depends on the language). The ring diacritic
which we already saw for /z/ is added below the symbol for the consonant
(or above if the symbol has a descender) to indicate that it is voiceless. It is
important to note that our use of this diacritic is different from the use
sometimes seen in transcribing partially voiced sounds in other languages,
such as the voiced consonants in English at the beginning or ending of a
wordKorean lenis consonants are voiceless word-initially, not partially
voiced.
bada /ba.da/ [ba.da]
[ -] dokki /do.ki/ [dok.ki]
gyeoul /j.ul/ [j.ul]
jaemi /.mi/ [.mi]
The plain stops /b, d, / in syllable codas are simply written [p, t, k] in
phonetic transcription since they are voiceless and do not need to contrast
with other stops in this position. In order to make it explicit that they always
have no audible release, we could write [p, t, k] in narrower transcriptions.
[] ap /ab/ [ap]
[] kkotbat /kod.pat/ [kot.pat]
[-] otcharim /od.a.lim/ [ot.a.im]
saenggak /z.a/ [z.ak]

This also applies when homorganic stops (those that are produced at the
same place of articulation) are repeated, in which case they result in
geminates.
[-] akgi /a.ki/ [ak.ki]
[] gatda /ad.ta/ [at.ta]
[-] hapbeop /hab.pb/ [hap.pp]
Tense consonants between vowels are similar in pronunciation to geminates,
which we indicate by inserting an italicized copy of the symbol (or for //,
an italicized copy of [t]) before the syllable break.
akkida /a.ki.da/ [ak.ki.da]
geuttae /.t/ [t.t]
oppa /o.pa/ [op.pa]
agassi /a.a.si/ [a.a.i]
eojji /.i/ [t.i]
The sibiliants /z, s/ are written [, ] in front of /i, j/ and [, ] in front of /y/
[y, i]. The use of the previously mentioned Extended IPA diacritic for strong
articulation is restricted to the allophones of tense /s/ in our system. It may
be tempting to write [, ] and [, ] respectively to maintain the pattern of
using voiceless symbols for the tense consonants. But the normal [, ] in
other languages tend to be weak enough to be identified with allophones of
the non-tense s /z/ in Korean, unlike [s] in most languages that tend to be
identified with the tense ss /s/. This probably has to do with the fact that
among sibilants, the hiss consonant [s] is the most high-pitched and most
prominent while hush consonants like [, ] tend to be lower-pitched and
less prominent.
masyeo /ma.zj/ [ma.j]
nalssi /nal.si/ [nal.i]
[ ] swipda /zyb.ta/ [yp.ta, ip-]
If /d/ comes before /s/ (usually underlying |z|), we treat it as if it
were completely assimilated to the following /s/ in the phonetic
transcription, producing a geminate sequence [s.s], [.], or [.] (see below
for the variable treatment of /s/ depending on the following vowel).
[] jeotso /d.so/ [s.so]
[] heotsim /hd.sim/ [h.im]
[-/-] baetsagong /bd.sa.o/ [bs.sa.o]
The liquid phoneme /l/ is written as a tap [] between vowels and after a
vowel and before /h/ (which becomes [] in this position). It is written [l]
otherwise. Phrase-initial /l/, which occurs only in loanwords in the South
Korean standard, can be either [] or [l]. We indicate both, with the order
depending on which is more suitable for the source language (although this

is somewhat arbitrary since [] and [l] are essentially in free variation in

such words).
[ -] saram /za.lam/ [za.am]
ilheun /il.hn/ [i.n]
[ -] gollan /ol.lan/ [ol.lan]
radio /la.di.o/ [a.di.o, la-]
remon /le.mon/ [le.mon, e-]
In voiced environments, /h/ is written as [] in order to describe its
voicing. This is more phonetic detail than we would normally go into, but we
indicate it here to help learners of Korean because the resulting [] is often
very weak and sometimes dropped completely. This contrasts with phraseinitial [h], which is quite prominent and can even have strong fricative
realizations.
[-/-] jihye /i.hje/ [i.je]
eunhaeng /n.h/ [n.]
gonghang /o.ha/ [o.a]
Front rounded vowels /y/ and // may also be pronounced [i] and [we]
respectively. In fact, in contemporary Standard Korean, these glide-vowel
pronunciations are predominant, but we put [y] and [] first because the
pronunciation we describe is of a more conservative variety that preserves
lexical length and the distinction between // and /e/.
wichi /y.i/ [y.i, i-]
[ / ] hoeui /h.i/ [h.i, hwe-]
In the conservative pronunciation which preserves lexical length, // is more
central than //, so we write it as [].
[ ] byeolbit /bjl.pid/ [bjl.pit]
[ -] Gyeongju /j.u/ [j.u]
3. Contemporary popular pronunciation
It suffices in most cases to provide the transcription of the conservative
pronunciation, because the contemporary popular pronunciation of Standard
Korean can be regularly predicted from it. Here are the main differences:

Lexical length distinction is all but lost. To indicate this, simply

eliminate the length marks () from the transcriptions based on the
conservative pronunciation, while remembering that [] becomes [],
e.g. [ ] byeolbit /bjl.pid/ [bjl.pit] becomes [bjl.pit].

The distinction between the mid vowels // and /e/ is all but lost. To
indicate this, simply write [e] for all cases of //, e.g.
jaemi /.mi/ [.mi] becomes [e.mi].

Traditional front rounded vowels /y/ and // are

exclusively pronounced as glide-vowel sequences [i] and [we], e.g.
wichi /y.i/ [y.i, i-] becomes [i.i] and [ / ]
hoeui /h.i/ [h.i, hwe-] becomes [hwe.i].

However, some differences are not regular. Contemporary popular

pronunciation may also replace standard forms with dialectal forms, e.g.
ne-ga /ne.a/ is frequently replaced by dialectal ni-ga /ni.a/ in order
to distinguish it from nae-ga /n.a/ which becomes [ne.a] through
the ///e/ merger. In addition, tensification is more widespread than is
recognized in standard pronunciation, e.g. standard [ -]
gimbap /im.bab/ [im.bap] frequently becomes /im.pab/ [im.pap],
or [im.pap] for the majority of Korean speakers who have lost lexical
length. In this site, the contemporary population pronunciation of Korean will
only be given if the pronunciations used are widespread and present
irregular differences from the standard pronunciations.