Korean has 19 consonant phonemes. For each plosive and affricate, there is a three-way contrast between unvoiced segments, which are distinguished as plain, tense, and aspirated. • The "plain" segments, sometimes referred to as "lax" or "lenis", are considered to be the more "basic" or unmarked members of the Korean obstruent series. The "plain" segments are also distinguished from the
tense and
aspirated phonemes by changes in
vowel quality, including a relatively lower
pitch of the following vowel. • The "tense" segments, also referred to as "fortis", "hard", or "glottalized", have eluded precise description and have been the subject of considerable phonetic investigation. In the
Korean alphabet as well as all widely used
romanization systems for Korean, they are represented as doubled plain segments: , , , . As it was suggested from the
Middle Korean spelling, the tense consonants came from the initial consonant clusters
sC-,
pC-, and
psC-. • The "aspirated" segments are characterized by
aspiration, a burst of air accompanied by the delayed
onset of voicing. Korean
syllable structure is maximally CGVC, where G is a glide . (There is a unique off-glide
diphthong in the character 의 that combines the sounds and creating ). Any consonant except may occur initially, but only may occur finally. Sequences of two consonants may occur between vowels.
Plain are voiced between sonorants (including all vowels and
certain consonants) but voiceless elsewhere. Among younger generations, they may be just as aspirated as in initial position; the primary difference is that vowels following the plain consonants
carry low tone.
Aspirated are strongly aspirated, more so than English voiceless stops. They generally do not undergo intervocalic voicing, but a 2020 study reports that it still occurs in around 10 to 15% of cases. It is more prevalent among older male speakers who have aspirated stops voiced in as much as 28% of cases. The Korean consonants also have elements of
stiff voice, but it is not yet known how typical that is of faucalized consonants. Sometimes the tense consonants are marked with an apostrophe, , but that is not IPA usage; in the IPA, the apostrophe indicates
ejective consonants. Some works use full-size or small before tensed consonants; this notation is generally used to denote
pre-glottalization. An asterisk after a tensed consonant is also used in literature. proposes that the "tensed" series of sounds are (fundamentally) regular voiceless, unaspirated consonants: the "lax" sounds are voiced consonants that become devoiced initially, and the primary distinguishing feature between word-initial "lax" and "tensed" consonants is that initial
lax sounds cause the following vowel to assume a low-to-high pitch contour, a feature reportedly associated with voiced consonants in many Asian languages (such as
Shanghainese), whereas tensed (and also aspirated) consonants are associated with a uniformly high pitch. Vowels before tense consonants (as well as aspirated) tend to be shorter than before lax stops. does not occur in initial position, reflected in the way the Hangul
jamo has a different pronunciation in the initial position to the final position. These were distinguished when Hangul was created, with the
jamo with the upper dot and the
jamo without the upper dot; these were then conflated and merged in both the North Korean and South Korean standards. can technically occur syllable-initially, as in , which is written as , but pronounced as . is an alveolar flap between vowels or between a vowel and an . It is or at the end of a word, before a consonant other than , or next to another ; in these contexts, it is palatalized to before and before palatal consonant allophones. There is free variation at the beginning of a word, where this phoneme tends to become before most vowels and silent before , but it is commonly in English loanwords. Geminate is realized as , or as before . In native Korean words, does not occur word initially, unlike in Chinese loans (
Sino-Korean vocabulary).) or to (as in 밟다 "to step"); 여덟 "eight" is always pronounced 여덜 even when followed by a vowel-initial particle. Thus, no sequence reduces to in final position. : When such a sequence is followed by a consonant, the same reduction takes place, but a trace of the lost consonant may remain in its effect on the following consonant. The effects are the same as in a sequence between vowels: an elided obstruent will leave the third consonant fortis, if it is a stop, and an elided will leave it aspirated. Most conceivable combinations do not actually occur; a few examples are = , = , = , = , = , = ; also = , as has no effect on a following , and = , with the dropping out. When the second and third consonants are homorganic obstruents, they merge, becoming fortis or aspirate, and, depending on the word and a preceding , might not elide: is . An elided has no effect: = , = , = , = , = , = , = , = , = , = , = .
Positional allophones Korean consonants have three principal positional allophones: initial, medial (voiced), and final (checked). The initial form is found at the beginning of
phonological words. The medial form is found in voiced environments, intervocalically (immediately between vowels), and after a voiced consonant such as or . The final form is found in checked environments such as at the end of a phonological word or before an obstruent consonant such as or . Nasal consonants (, , ) do not have noticeable positional allophones beyond initial denasalization, and cannot appear in this position. The table below is out of alphabetical order to make the relationships between the consonants explicit: All
obstruents (stops, affricates, fricatives) become stops with
no audible release at the end of a word: all coronals collapse to , all labials to , and all velars to . Final is a
lateral or .
Palatalization The vowel that most affects consonants is , which, along with its semivowel homologue , palatalizes and to
alveolo-palatal and for most speakers (see
North–South differences in the Korean language). are pronounced in
Seoul, but typically pronounced in
Pyongyang. Similarly, are palatalized as before in Seoul. In Pyongyang they remain unchanged. This pronunciation may be also found in Seoul Korean among some speakers, especially before back vowels. As noted above, initial is silent in this palatalizing environment, at least in South Korea. Similarly, an underlying or at the
end of a morpheme becomes a phonemically palatalized affricate or , respectively, when followed by a word or suffix beginning with or (it becomes indistinguishable from an underlying ), but that does not happen within native Korean words such as "where?". is more affected by vowels, often becoming an affricate when followed by or : , . The most variable consonant is , which becomes a
palatal before or , a
velar before , and a
bilabial before , and . In many morphological processes, a vowel before another vowel may become the semivowel . Likewise, and , before another vowel, may reduce to . In some dialects and speech registers, the semivowel assimilates into a following or and produces the front rounded vowels and .
Consonant assimilation As noted above,
tenuis stops and are voiced after the voiced consonants , and the resulting voiced tends to be elided. Tenuis stops become fortis after obstruents (which, as noted above, are reduced to ); that is, is pronounced . On the other hand, fortis and nasal stops are unaffected by either environment, though assimilates to after an . After , tenuis stops become aspirated, becomes fortis, and is unaffected. Additionally, undergoes significant changes: it becomes after all consonants except (which assimilates to ) or another . For example, the word (종로) is pronounced (종노). Korean also features regressive (anticipatory) assimilation, where a consonant tends to assimilate in
manner but not in
place of articulation. For example, obstruents become nasal stops before nasal stops (which, as just noted, includes underlying ), but do not change their position in the mouth. Velar stops (that is, all consonants pronounced in final position) become ; coronals () become , and labials () become . For example, (한국말) is pronounced (한궁말) (phonetically ). • Velar obstruents found in final position: , , • Final coronal obstruents: , , , , , • Final labial obstruents: , The resulting geminate obstruents, such as , , , and (that is, , , , and ), tend to reduce (, , , ) in rapid conversation. Heterorganic obstruent sequences such as and may, less frequently, assimilate to geminates (, ) and also reduce to (, ). These sequences assimilate with following vowels the way single consonants do, so that for example and palatalize to (that is, ) before and ; and affricate to and before ; , , and palatalize to and across morpheme boundaries, and so on.
Hangul orthography does not generally reflect these assimilatory processes, but rather maintains the underlying
morphology in most cases. ==Vowels==