In the closing days of WWII, the Korean Peninsula, home to one of the most ethnically homogenous populations in the world with political boundaries among the oldest on earth, was arbitrarily divided by the great powers. In the intervening eight decades, nearly every aspect of life in North and South Korea has diverged dramatically. This has far-reaching implications both for possible reunification and for North Korean refugees living in the South. Have we reached a point of no return?
One area of divergence that touches on various themes in inter-Korean relations is the widening gulf between the northern and southern Korean language varieties. Since the 1980s, research in the field of Korean linguistics has analysed and documented specific areas of divergence between the languages, tracing this back to state-led North Korean language planning campaigns from the 1940s, 50s and 60s.
More recent research has studied the increasing population of North Korean ‘refugees’ (increasingly referred to as ‘newly settled peoples’ or saet’ŏmin in South Korean parlance) from a sociological perspective, examining their difficulties adapting to life in the south. Although ‘language difference’ has been identified as a perennial difficulty experienced by these saet’ŏmin when adapting to South Korean life, relatively little research in either English or Korean has delved into the specific language difficulties experienced by refugees, and how this may be explained by particular language planning campaigns described by earlier research in linguistics.
This article seeks to provide context to the documented experience of saet’ŏmin in South Korea in reference to language campaigns and developments in the Koreas, particularly related to ‘language purification.’
The Korean language before division
Despite Korea’s long history of political, cultural and ethnic cohesion, the Korean language did not experience similar unification. Hanmun (Classical Chinese) was the language of erudition and knowledge propagation throughout recorded history of Korea. Vernacular Korean as we know it today was not the subject of sustained study or standardisation until the late nineteenth century. The policies of the Japanese colonial era (1910-1945) then hijacked the nascent campaign to promote, study, and standardise Korean, severely restricting the language and then attempting to eradicate it entirely. When the Korean Peninsula was divided in 1945, competing regimes applied contrasting approaches of policy and planning to a language that had never been truly standardised, planting the seeds for even more drastic divergence.
While a considerable dose of language nationalism could be found in both regimes as they reacted against past Japanese oppression and promoted their newly independent language, North Korea’s language policies have been far more reactionary, prescriptive, exclusionary, state-centred, and ideologically driven. For example, whereas in South Korea post-1945 there was an impetus to remove hancha (Chinese characters) from the language in favour of hangul only and to expel Japanese loan words from the language, more conservative elements in society and the country’s overall laissez-faire approach to its language has meant that language change has been largely driven by the linguistic market and the whims of the public. On the other hand, North Korea’s concerted, state-directed efforts at language policy and planning not only eliminated hancha from virtually all publications early in 1949, but also severely limited foreign borrowings (especially from Japanese and English) and instituted a far-reaching campaign to create ‘pure’ (North) Korean neologisms (newly coined words). These policy differences have had lasting impacts on the Korean language and have, in a sense, created distinct Northern and Southern Korean language varieties that did not exist in 1945. Korean may now be arguably categorised as a pluricentric language with more than one standardised variety, akin to Spanish (peninsular and Latin American) and French (Parisian and Canadian), in contrast to monocentric languages such as Japanese and Russian.
North Korean language policy and planning
How did two language varieties emerge in a matter of decades from a population with such a long history of cultural and political unity, and what does this mean for the future of the Koreas? Although significant changes occurred in language on both sides of the 38th parallel, the focus in this article is on North Korean state-led language policies, and how they explain the specific difficulties encountered by North Korean saet’ŏmin in South Korea as they grapple with adjusting to life there.
In 1945 the Korean language had an established tradition of ‘mixed-script’ writing, that is, a mixture of alphabetic hangul and ideographic hancha, akin to Japanese writing today (which I have argued elsewhere was influenced by Japanese writing practices during the colonial period). This was especially true of high-level prose for an educated audience, including newspapers, and academic or technical writing of any kind. Just as words deriving from Latin figure prominently into Romance languages, vocabulary with Sinitic roots have been estimated to constitute more than 60 percent of the Korean lexicon, a figure higher in specialised fields. In the Korean language, such words can be written in either hancha or hangul (but pronounced the same way), but in the immediate post-division era, these words were overwhelmingly represented in hancha, a legacy of colonial education where the majority of educated Koreans were predominantly products of Japanese-run schools. This meant that, to be considered fully literate, it was not enough to learn only hangul, itself a relatively rare skill in 1945, but mixed script as well.
The northern half of the peninsula, occupied by the Soviet Union and placing a premium on mass literacy for the effective spread of propaganda and the advancement of socialist revolution, removed hancha completely from publications in 1949, though it has continued to be taught in a limited number in schools. The North Korean regime considered hancha to be a legacy of ‘feudalistic,’ ‘toadyistic’ culture and education that shamefully worshipped Chinese civilisation while neglecting its own proud heritage. Accompanying this removal of hancha from the writing system was a series of shock campaigns that sought to universalise literacy in hangul-only writing. According to Soviet sources, beginning with a 1945 illiteracy rate of more than three quarters (and even higher for mixed script), North Korea virtually eliminated illiteracy even before the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. South Korea today has also removed hancha from mainstream life, but this was a much more gradual process that has only come to fruition in the past decade or so. A heavy dose of mixed script writing may still be found in certain areas of the humanities and in some technical fields, which has implications for North Korean saet’ŏmin entering some university majors or professions.
However, it is the North Korean language policies from the 1960s that laid the foundations for more drastic divergence between the language varieties and has posed the greatest challenges for saet’ŏmin. In that decade the North Korean leader Kim Il-sung conducted and published his so-called ‘Conversations with Linguists’ (1964 and 1966), which served as blueprints for officially establishing what would be known as ‘Cultured Language’ (Munhwaŏ), the new national language of North Korea.
In these ‘Conversations,’ Kim portrayed the southern variety as ‘inundated with foreign borrowings,’ a ‘gibberish mixture of Chinese, Japanese and English’ that had lost its ethno-national characteristics, necessitating the DPRK’s intercession to defend the language. In addition to the explicit proscription of foreign borrowings (especially from English and Japanese), Kim called on creating pure (North) Korean words to replace not only Japanese and English loan words, but the extremely numerous Sino-Korean vocables as well. A successful campaign to do away with (obvious) Japanese loans also unfolded in South Korea, and so the first area was not as consequential, but in the case of English loans and Sino-Korean vocabulary, these proclamations by Kim and the subsequent policies they engendered have resulted in profound divergence in the Korean varieties.
It is estimated that there was an attempt to introduce some 50,000 new words in North Korea from 1974-1978, later reduced to 25,000, of which 10,200 eventually appeared in the Chosŏnmal taesajŏn (Unabridged Dictionary of (North) Korean (1986)). Although South Korea also recorded a considerable number of neologisms, 21,000 from 1977-2002, these were limited mainly to technical vocabulary in some 41 different specialist fields and are not generally known by the wider public, whereas the North Korean vocabulary concerns very commonly used words in daily life, and so presents greater implications for the average citizen. Research has shown that the greatest divergence between the languages has been in the various areas of lexicon, including synonyms like kungmin (citizen; NK: inmin), words with the same spelling and pronunciation but different connotations such as tongji (friend or colleague; NK: comrade), remaining Sino-Korean words such as minganin (civilian; NK: samin, private citizen), and even the pronunciation and spelling of limited loan words such as k’ŏp (NK: koppu, cup), the latter revealing Russian influence.
The most highly publicised (and for some snicker-inducing) changes however are the North Korean attempts at actively creating pure Korean words in place of Sino-Korean words such as Hanbok (traditional Korean clothing; NK: Chosŏn ot (North) Korean clothing), hongsu (flood; NK: k’ŭn mul, big water), sirŏp (syrup; NK: tanmul, sweet water), rek’odŭ ((music) record; NK: sorip’an, sound disk) and p’ama (perm; NK: pokkŭm mŏri, fried hair). Although not all of the government’s ambitious lexical creations have been accepted even in the rather captive audience that is North Korea, the significant number of successful adaptations along with the very effective limitation of foreign borrowings have contributed to the creation of a very distinct language variety. This directly affects the linguistic assimilation of North Korean saet’ŏmin when they settle in the south.
An uphill battle: Adapting to South Korean linguistic life
North Korean refugees living in South Korea have recently been estimated to number 34,000. Upon arrival in the South all saet’ŏmin must undergo a mandatory three-month refugee program at Hanawon, a resettlement support centre sponsored by the South Korean government. However, only a fraction of the curriculum is dedicated to the issue of language: according to scholar Mi Yung Park, the language support program, which covers ‘differences in the Northern and Southern varieties of Korean, South Korean standards of pronunciation, loan words, and basic English,’ makes up just 10 percent of the overall curriculum.
Moreover, South Korean experts on North Korea tend to underestimate the extent of difference between the languages and the challenges it poses to new settlers, believing the languages to be for the most part mutually intelligible. According to one study, just 3.3 percent of self-reported experts on North Korea in South Korea claimed that linguistic differences created friction (kaltŭng) between people from the two countries, the smallest percentage accorded to a range of different possible factors including life experience and religious difference. But the same study found that saet’ŏmin ranked linguistic challenges much more highly, indeed as the most significant impediment, with over 70 percent of respondents reporting ‘much difficulty’ or ‘considerable difficulty’ due to language. Importantly, all of the 34 saet’ŏmin interviewed as part of this study indicated language difference as a contributing factor to difficulty in work life.
One of the most revealing points about this data is that language difficulties are not concentrated in any one area, but rather run the gamut. Significant percentages of respondents reported experiencing difficulties due to differences in pronunciation and intonation, the extensive use of English expressions in South Korea, differences in honorifics, ignorance of hancha, not knowing the name for an object or everyday vocabulary word, and a feeling of self-consciousness when interacting with southerners. These findings suggest that active North Korean language policy and planning has exacerbated a divide in the language varieties.
In particular, this and other research has found that a so-called ‘English divide,’ a much maligned phenomenon separating the haves and have-nots within South Korean society, is reproduced and magnified in inter-Korean relations, making English a particular stumbling block for North Korean saet’ŏmin. Although North Korea recently overhauled its English language curriculum, promoting the once maligned ‘enemy’ language of English to sole foreign language (while completing removing Russian) and increasing its share of the curriculum, such education does not seek to develop an international understanding of the world or increase communicative competence, but rather functions ‘as a practical tool to indoctrinate citizens and stabilise the regime’. In other words, English is learned as a tool for denouncing North Korea’s enemies and glorifying the regime in a medium with broad potential reach, which is of limited use for saet’ŏmin when adapting to English as it is employed in the South.
Perhaps the most troubling aspects of linguistic tension experienced by saet’ŏmin however are the psychological ramifications. It has been noted that the language curriculum at the refugee program at Hanawon is oriented toward assimilation to a South Korean standard and ‘removing’ the problematic vestiges of a North Korean accent so that saet’ŏmin may get along ‘undetected’ in South Korean society, a sentiment which is often echoed by North Korean interviewees. However, other studies have found that a future-oriented perspective on North Korean language in the South as a potential source of linguistic capital in the event of hypothetical Korean unification imbued some North Korean respondents with a sense of purpose and importance. Other research has reported extensive discrimination experienced by saet’ŏmin due to language difficulties, while many respondents are either mistakenly ascribed or assume the identity of ethnic Korean Chinese (Chosŏnjok), various Korean dialect speakers, or overseas Koreans rather than revealing their true identities. This suggests that many saet’ŏmin view their background and identity as an impediment or mark of shame rather than a potential asset that might be fostered.
As the population of saet’ŏmin inevitably increases in the south, the difference between the North and South Korean language varieties will continue to be a salient issue. Reflecting the perceived widening gap between the languages, work began in 2005 on the Kyŏremal k’ŭn sajŏn (Unabridged Dictionary of Our Language), an ongoing joint project involving experts from North and South Korea that seeks to index the entire Korean language and ‘re-converge’ the varieties. In the event of unification moreover, the issue would have even more intense and far-reaching ramifications for the entire population of the Korean Peninsula as it deals with social inequality, discrimination, and power imbalances.
Not only is it paramount that we identify the different areas and specific reasons for linguistic difference, but also determine how this history of linguistic change continues to affect the Koreas today. Moreover, extra care must be taken not to demonise either variety, blame either side for the linguistic divergence, or identify either language as flawed or an impediment that needs to be eliminated or overcome, but rather embrace linguistic diversity and acknowledge pluricentric Korean as an unexpected, though at this point established, by-product of division.
Image: People in Seoul. Credit: Steffen Flor/Flickr. This image has been cropped.