A Tale of Two Languages: Hangul and Chosono

I was eating dinner. Only eating, I was not speaking at all. My coworkers were talking very freely and friendlily. They were not oppressed by anything. They did not look like people who joined this company a month ago. They were living in their world, their South Korean world.

Our superior, who was eating dinner with us, said something and my coworkers started to introduce themselves. They said their name, something about their family, and about their hobbies. Someone said that his favorite food was pizza. What could a pizza be? I have never heard of a food called pizza.

When the person sitting next to me finished introducing himself, it was my turn. I had to say something. I wished not to say anything at the dinner table because my accent would reveal my identity. Even though many of them already knew that I was a North Korean, I did not want to tell this with my own lips. Unfortunately, I had to speak with my awkward South Korean accent.

“My name is Lee Hyeon… No, Yi Hyeon-Jin.”

I made a mistake again. My name was not Lee Hyeon-Jin, but Yi Hyeon-Jin. South Koreans never used the family name Lee; it was their grammar. They called this rule the “initial sound law (dueumbupchik),” which states that when the [li] sound comes at the beginning of a word, this sound should change to [i]. I had to think one more time even before saying my name.

 “I like to play soccer with my dongmus (dongmu: Korean for “comrade”). My dongmus are very good soccer players.”

My coworkers and my superior looked at me suspiciously. Using their facial expressions, they said “I cannot understand you.” What a catastrophe. I should have not said “dongmu” when referring to a friend, because South Koreans use chingu (Korean for “friend”) to refer the same thing. I heard that in South Korea, because the word “dongmu” contains a communist connotation, this word is no longer used to refer a friend.

I said lots of more things, and I finally finished my long self-introduction. I finished, but failed the “South Korean Language Test.” They could not understand me, and I could not understand them. The discrepancy between languages was so great that I experienced difficulties even when introducing myself.

Before Korea was partitioned, there were many regional dialects which slightly differed from others. When Korea was partitioned after the Korean War, South Korea chose the Seoul dialect as the standard, but North Korea heavily based their language on the Pyongyang dialect. Even though these two dialects differed before the partition of Korea, their difference was not as great as the difference between North and South Korean language today.

The language of North and South Korea began to greatly differ when North Korea made a new rule for Hangul orthography (“Chosono Choljabop”) in 1954. The rule itself contained only minor changes from the “Proposal for Unified Korean Orthography (Hangul Matchumbeop Tongiran),” the original rule for Korean orthography made in 1933 by the Korean Language Society. After this rule was made, North Koreans started to call their language “Chosono,” setting their language apart from the South Korean “Hangul.”

Affected by the Juche idea, Kim-Il-Sung started to alter the North Korean language by issuing rules such as “A Number of Issues on the Development of the Korean Language” (1964), “In Rightly Advancing the Racial Characteristics of the Korean Language” (1966) and “Standard Korean Language” (1966). The language changing process in North Korea was administered by the National Language Revision Committee, which was under the control of the North Korean government. New rules were still made in the 21^st century, like “Standard Spacing Rules in Writing Korean” (2000) and “Rules for Spacing in Writing Korean” (2003).

As a result, Hangul and Chosono became very different languages. Many words derived from English vocabulary or Chinese characters were changed to pure Korean in Chosono. These words were changed because of the Juche idea, which insists that using vocabulary derived from English or Chinese harms perfect autonomy. Moreover, some words look the same but differ in meaning because of the different political setting of North and South Korea. For instance, the word “dongmu” meant “friend” in Hangul, but the same word means “comrade” in Chosono, meaning a friend in the communist context. Hangul and Chosono also became different in accent, pitch, spacing, pronunciation, and orthography.

The differences between Hangul and Chosono are causing unexpected problems. North Korean defectors are experiencing difficulties when adapting to South Korean society because their accent is different from that of South Koreans. Because Hangul and Chosono have very different accents, almost every South Korean can immediately recognize a North Korean by his accent. Furthermore, North Koreans only understand about 60% of the South Korean language. Moreover, if the difference between these languages increases, North and South Koreans can easily lose their sense of kinship because they lose a crucial bonding element called language. If Hangul and Chosono were not so different, the North Korean defector would have experienced less or no difficulties when introducing himself at a dinner.

North and South Koreans were originally the same ethnic group, so they shared their language. The ancestors of North and South Koreans lived in a same nation called the Chosun dynasty. However, because the discrepancy between Hangul and Chosono increased and increased, North and South Koreans no longer think the other one as the same ethnic group. To North Koreans, South Koreans are people who use a language that they cannot understand. To South Koreans, North Koreans are people who changed their language to serve their ideology. They cannot understand each other. They cannot properly introduce themselves. The bridge between North and South Koreans are blocked; they cannot communicate.

<Sources>

Hyeonseo Lee: My escape from North Korea

Korean Language: Differences Between North and South

North Korea: A day in the life

North–South differences in the Korean language