Sound symbolism in Korean names

Abstract Sound symbolism is the idea that meaning can be encoded at a submorphemic level. Recent research argues that it is more pervasive than previously assumed. We contribute to this line of work by investigating cross-linguistic and language-specific patterns in Korean given names, finding that patterns match those found in other languages, except in the case of vowel height where there may be an interaction with Korean-specific sound symbolism. In native sound symbolic words, dark (higher) vowels are associated with largeness and light (lower) vowels, with smallness, contrary to the cross-linguistic vowel height-size symbolism where higher vowels are associated with smallness. We find that light-dark sound symbolism appears to override vowel height symbolism, but only for light or dark vowels. Our study adds to the growing body of literature demonstrating the presence of sound symbolism in given names and suggests that tensions between cross-linguistic tendencies and language-specific patterns manifest in them.