Word Accent of Cheju Dialects in Korean

제주 방언의 낱말 악센트

This paper investigates the word accent pattern of Cheju dialects in Korean and determines whether it varies according to the age as well as the word itself and where the speakers come from. On the basis on the theory of pitch accent, which was suggested by Koo(1993) and Jung(1965) for the Korean standard accent, the fundamental frequency of each syllable is measured. The syllable that has the highest frequency is labelled for 2, while the rests for 1. The results of the experiment are that the two syllabic words have 21 accent pattern, while the three syllabic words 121 pattern and the four syllabic words 1211. In addition to this characteristic of accent pattern in Cheju dialects, it is interesting that the older the speakers, the less accent pattern the utterance has as suggested above.