Variation of Word-Initial Length by Age in Seoul Dialect

서울말 장단의 연령별 변이

The aim of this paper is to show what are the sociolinguistic variables of word-initial length loss in Seoul dialect. 350 people were inquired to pronounce 40 words. Among the informants, 152 were male, and 198 were female. In terms of their age, 49 were twenties, 70 were thirties, 69 were forties, 71 were fifties, and 91 were above sixties. According to our statistics, 18 words show sociolinguistic variation by age, and sex was not a variable. So we can conclude that Seoul dialect is undergoing length loss by age at least. But we need to enlarge the number of words and informants and we also need to adopt other variables like social level, education etc for better understanding of Seoul dialect.