Yesterday one of my students defended her PhD thesis on foreign accent in Korean, and among the many interesting things she points out is that there is no agreed-upon Korean term for "foreign accent", either among scholars or laypeople.

In her survey of the academic lit, she reports the terms 외국인 말투, 외국인 어투, 외국인 억양, 외국인 악센트, 외국어 악센트, and 외국어투. Among these, the most common seems to be 외국인 악센트, which is the Korean word for "foreigner" + a transliteration of English "accent".

She also interviewed 30 Korean laypeople about what the most appropriate term would be, and got all of the above PLUS 외국어 말투, 외국어 억양, 외국 악센트, and 외국 억양. All these options can be roughly summarized as {외국인 | 외국어 | 외국} + {말투 | 어투 | 억양 | 악센트}.

For non-Korean speakers: Each of these is a compound, and there are multiple options for each element. For the first element, it's a choice from among "foreign person", "foreign language" or just "foreign".

For the second element, it's a choice from among two different words roughly meaning "way of speaking", a word usually used to refer to intonation, and the word that's a transliteration of English "accent".

Academics seem to like to use "accent" transliterated, but the majority of laypeople said it was weird, and should only be used for describing English pronunciation(!), not Korean pronunciation. Instead, they liked 말투 and 어투, which were the words for "way of speaking".

This presents quite a challenge for research on foreign accent in Korean, because when your experiment asks listeners to e.g. "rate the foreign accent of the talker" but they all have diff ideas about what "foreign accent" is and who uses it, it's hard to interpret the results.

To make matters even more complicated, many of the definitions for the different terms further hinge on the definition of 외국인 ("foreigner/foreign person"), but nobody agrees on what that is, either