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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 26, No. 0, pp.46-63
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2026
Received 19 Aug 2025 Revised 18 Nov 2025 Accepted 15 Dec 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.26..202601.46

The Social Conditioning of Selective Phonetic Convergence

Yoojin Kang
Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Literature Cheongju University Daesung-ro 298, Cheongwon-gu Cheongju, Korea, Tel: +82-43-229-8353 yjkang@cju.ac.kr


© 2026 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This study examines how partner dialect background, sociolinguistic awareness, length of residence, and gender influence phonetic accommodation in a regional vowel merger context. Through acoustic analysis of conversational interviews, the findings reveal that spousal interaction provides a dense, intimate, and sustained source of dialectal input. However, convergence toward local vowel patterns is not a mechanical consequence of exposure but is selectively modulated by speakers’ awareness of the feature’s social markedness. The results further show that high-frequency lexical items with strong social associations resist convergence, indicating that usage frequency alone cannot fully explain patterns of phonetic accommodation. Rather, phonetic realization patterns reflect the interaction between frequency and socially activated identity cues. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that phonetic accommodation functions as a socially filtered and feature-specific process shaped by exposure dynamics, social awareness, and identity positioning, rather than by contact frequency alone.

Keywords:

vowel merger, phonetic accommodation, adult second dialect acquisition

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