About me

I’m Jonny Kim, a linguist specializing in experimental phonetics and phonology. My research focuses on sociophonetic variation, speech perception, and the interaction between phonetic detail and social meaning.

September 2023 – present
Associate Professor at the Department of English Language and Literature, Pusan National University, Korea
September 2019 – August 2023
Assistant Professor at the Department of English Language and Literature, Pusan National University, Korea
April 2018 – August 2019
Research Assistant Professor at Hanyang Institute for Phonetics and Cognitive Sciences of Language (HIPCS)
August 2011 – May 2018
Ph.D. in linguistics at the Department of Linguistics, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

About my name

I am also known as Jungyun Kim (김정윤) in Korea, and started to publish my work under the name Jonny Jungyun Kim since 2021.

My mom gave me a given name Jungyun, roughly pronounced [t͡ʃʌŋ.jun]—unlike in English, the initial affricate is unrounded and patterns as phonologically voiced, contrasting with [t͡ʰʃ] (i.e., the /ㅊ/ consonant), which shows greater aspiration and higher VOT. Since I was born in Tallahassee, Florida, she also gave me the English name Jonny, which sounds a bit like Jungyun plus a Korean vocative suffix /-i/ (with some degree of phonetic reduction, of course).

This kind of noticing phonetic similarities and differences across words—sometimes even across languages—likely sparked my interest in speech sounds from an early age. However, I moved to Korea at around 10 months old and have spent most of my life there, receiving all of my education in Korea except for my doctoral training. So, despite working in an English department and specializing in phonetics, my English pronunciation is far from that of native speakers. Nevertheless, I am proud of my socio-indexical features in the pronunciation of my full name (Jonny Jungyun Kim), as they reflect an important part of my identity.

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