South Korea: Tongue Operations for Better English Pronunciation

Despite the fact that it has been a contemporary lingua franca for more than half a century, the English language still represents a challenge for millions of people worldwide.

Global market conditions are motivating the emerging international workforce to speak English at an advanced level in order to get a better job.  Knowledge of English has thus become a key professional skill, which is why people all over the world are eager to learn it.

SEE ALSO: Learning English for Better Business Opportunities

In South Korea, it seems that the endeavor to speak English like a native speaker may have gone too far.

Tongue operations for better English pronunciation have been a trend in South Korea and China for several decades.  Apparently, people in these two countries are ready to have surgeries that will allegedly help them speak English better.  Not only have many older people had the operations, but they have also, supposedly, forced their children to have them at an early age.

The operation is described as a simple, non-risky procedure that extends the tongue, thus enabling native Korean and Chinese speakers to better pronounce English sounds.  The procedure is called lingual frenectomy and seems to have been very popular in many Asian countries since the 50s and 60s.

According to some sources, many dentists suggest that their patients have the procedure.  They insist that the operation would help them better follow certain phonological rules of English, particularly, to make a distinction between English /l/ and /r/, which is very difficult for Korean and Chinese speakers.  Instead of using these two distinct sounds, they use a single alveolar consonant for both.  In addition, the operation is said to help Korean speakers overcome problems pronouncing /w/ and /f/.

However, none of these difficulties in pronunciation requires tongue surgery.  Despite the fact that Korean is significantly different from English phonologically, all the problematic sounds CAN be learnt.

For Koreans, or for native speakers of any other language, the inability to properly pronounce a certain English sound almost never stems from their anatomic features, and this is what makes the whole surgery idea ridiculous.  The manipulation of one’s speech anatomy can be learnt but it requires a lot of practice.  As most experts would agree, proper pronunciation is a matter of knowledge and practice only.  There are no “short cuts”, surgical or otherwise, to improvement of one’s English pronunciation.

The general public detested the stories of such operations but there have been suggestions that they are founded on nothing but an urban myth.

Myth or not, however, the very idea that some people are willing to alter their body in order to speak English better is an alarming thought.  It shows that learning correct pronunciation has become a pressure for some learners and that inadequate pronunciation ability can cause people to feel bad about themselves.  To avoid this, it is important to realize both that mistakes are an integral part of the language learning process, and that they can be eliminated by proper practice.