This introduction to the sounds of Korean is designed for English-speaking students with no prior knowledge of the language and includes online sound files, which demonstrate the sounds and pronunciation described. It will be an invaluable resource for students of Korean wanting to understand the basis of the current state of Korean phonetics and phonology, as well as for those studying Korean linguistics. • Provides a complete and authoritative description and explanation of the current state of Korean phonetics and phonology • Gives clear comparisons with English and provides practical advice on pronunciation • Provides a wealth of authentic Korean examples. • Each chapter contains exercises and Did you know? sections to help students put their knowledge into practice.

This book is a highly readable introduction to Korean pronunciation for students at all levels of proficiency. Beginners will find the information and practice they need to cross the threshold of intelligibility in Korean, while more advanced students will have the opportunity to fine-tune their pronunciation and improve their comprehension. The Sounds of Korean focuses on the most challenging features of Korean pronunciation. Careful attention is paid to the way in which a sound's pronunciation can be modified in different contexts. The first part of the text consists of an overview and chapters on vowel and consonant sounds in Korean, adjustment processes that modify speech sounds in different positions within words and phrases, and the role of prosody in expressing meaning and emotion. The practice exercises that follow are paired with the various contrasts and adjustment processes discussed earlier. These exercises, recorded in MP3 format by two native speakers (male and female) from Seoul, give students systematic, focused exposure to natural colloquial speech that represents the way Korean is actually spoken in the real world.

The University of Washington-Korea Studies Program, in collaboration with Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, is proud to publish the Journal of Korean Studies.

The Handbook of Korean Linguistics presents state-of-the-art overviews of the linguistic research on the Korean language. • Structured to allow a range of theoretical perspectives in addressing linguistic phenomena • Includes chapters on Old Korean and Middle Korean, present-day language policies in North and South Korea, social aspects of Korean as a heritage language, and honorifics • Indispensable and unique resource not only for those studying Korean linguistics but cross-linguistic research in general

Using ethnographic data collected in China and South Korea between 2004 and 2011, author Sunhee Koo provides a comprehensive view of the music of Koreans in China (Chaoxianzu), from its time as manifestation of a displaced culture to its return home after more than a century of amalgamation and change in China. As the first English-language book on the music and identity of China’s Korean minority community, Sound of the Border investigates diasporic mutations of Korean culture, influenced by power dynamics in the host country and the constant renewal of relationships with the homeland. Between the 1860s and the 1940s, about two million Koreans migrated to China in search of economic opportunity and political stability. Settling primarily in the northeastern part of China bordering the Russian Far East, these Koreans had flexibility in crossing geopolitical and cultural boundaries throughout the first half of the twentieth century. In 1949, the majority of Koreans in China accepted their new citizenship designation as one of the PRC’s fifty-five official national minorities. The subsequent partition of the Korean peninsula in 1953 further politicized their ethnic identity, and for the next forty years they were only authorized to interact with North Korea. It was only in the early 1990s that Chaoxianzu were able to renew their relationship with South Korea, although they now faced new challenges due to an ethno-national prejudice as it focused on the nation’s industrial advancement as the most prominent measure of its social superiority. Sunhee Koo examines the unique construction of diasporic Korean music in China and uses it as a window to understanding the complexities and diversification of Korean identity, shaped by the ideological and political bifurcation and post–Cold War political resurgence that have affected Northeast Asia. The performances of Korean Chinese musicians—positioned between their adopted state and the two Koreas—embody a complex cultural intersection crisscrossing ideological, political, and social boundaries in historical and present-day Northeast Asia. Migrants enact their agency in creating a unique sound for Korean Chinese identity through navigating cultural resources accessed in their host and the two distinctive motherlands.

This book provides a detailed survey of Korean and Japanese syntax from a comparative perspective, based within a generative framework. Yukata Sato and Sungdai Cho demonstrate that while the two languages exhibit remarkably similar morphosyntactic features, they behave differently in specific types of construction, with the main differences observed in genitive marking, sentence negation, Negative Polarity Items, the formation of causatives, and passivization. The book also explores pragmatic and sociolinguistic issues in the two languages, and shows that they differ in the perception and realization of 'givenness' as a topic marker and in the influence of relationships of power and distance on the use of honorifics. The authors further offer additional context by exploring the typological relationship between Japanese and Korean and the surrounding languages such as Ainu, and the Chinese and Altaic languages, as well as providing socio-cultural and historical background.

This is a comprehensive narrative history of Korean literature. It provides a wealth of information for scholars, students and lovers of literature. Combining both history and criticism the study reflects the latest scholarship and offers a systematic account of the development of all genres. Consisting of twenty-five chapters, it covers twentieth-century poetry, fiction by women and the literature of North Korea. This is a major contribution to the field and a study that will stand for many years as the primary resource for studying Korean literature.