A two-decade-interval variation in vowel insertion after word-final English and French postvocalic plosives in Korean adaptation

We have investigated whether variation in vowel insertion after word-final English and French postvocalic plosives in Korean adaptation has changed at a two-decade interval by collecting English and French loanword data in the early 1990s and the year 2011. The comparison of our 2011 data to the early 1990s data has revealed that the overall frequency of final vowel insertion and that of no vowel insertion are significantly decreased and increased, respectively, no matter whether the plosives are released, as in French, or not, as in English. For the diachronic change, we propose that Korean syllable structure constraints such as the Coda constraint exert more influence on variation in vowel insertion in the 2011 data than two decades ago and that the more role of the Coda constraint in the 2011 data is due to more direct contact with English and less direct contact with French.