North Korea's Korean, Explained

[00:00:00]a lowly and disgusting garbage language that exists nowhere else in the world.

[00:00:06]That isn't a line from a movie. That is the official definition of the South Korean language according to North Korea's Pyongyang Cultural Language Protection Act of 2023 as a way to protect itself from annihilation.

[00:00:20]Imagine living in a country where simply using the word OPA, a term almost every Kdrama fan knows, could land you in a labor camp. According to North Korea, they've purified their language and no longer speak the same language as South Koreans. But how successful has North Korea really been? Has it actually created a separate language?

[00:00:47]I spent the last 2 months trying to get to the bottom of this mystery. Now, North Korea notoriously withholds its information from the outside world, but I've managed to speak to scholars who study the North. I've listened to stories of countless defectors and I've even binge watched North Korean dramas for you guys.

[00:01:13]I wanted to move past the state propaganda and the common stereotypes we have about the north to see what's really happening behind the linguistic iron curtain.

[00:01:26]Driven by the ideology of chut or self-reliance, Pyongyang has spent decades systematically purging its language of outside influence. Since 1966, North Korea has called its official language or cultured language. This is in direct contrast to South Korea's official variety piling or standard language.

[00:01:47]Under moon, North Korea vowed to eradicate as many foreign terms as possible. For example, foreign concepts like gummies and juice, which did not exist in preodern Korea, were transliterated in South Korea as cherry and juice. North Korea however translated them using native Korean morphems. Gummy became tanmuk meaning sweet jelly like food while juice became tanmur meaning sweet water. Even clearly foreign foods such as the Japanese fish cake olding are translated using native Korean morphe literally fish rice cake. But here's the irony about all this purification. It didn't actually block out the rest of the world. It simply swapped who was doing the influencing. While South Korea modernized by borrowing heavily from English and retaining many Japanese colonial era loan words, North Korea borrowed from its big brother, the Soviet Union. Because Russia was seen as an ally, North Korea adopted Soviet style phonetic logic in many of its early loan words and transliterations.

[00:02:57]This range from ideological terms like campaign Campaign in the north versus campaign in the south and foreign foods caused even greater divergence as North Korea often borrowed directly from Russian while South Korea preferred English. So sausage became gaza in the north and sausi in the south. According to a 2016 study, 38% of everyday vocabulary differs between North and South Korea, while technical terms differ by 66%.

[00:03:27]And these differences have real world consequences. The National Institute of Korean Language estimates that over half of North Korean defectors take six or more years to acclimate to the language used in South Korea. Given these differences, it would be easy to assume that 80 years of political division created two distinct varieties of Korean. But that explanation misses a crucial part of the story. You see, long before the peninsula was divided in 1945, Korean was already divided into distinct regional dialects.

[00:04:03]If we look at a topographical map, the Korean peninsula is heavily divided by rugged mountains, mostly separating the flatter west side from the mountainous east side. These natural boundaries, along with different settlement patterns, led Korea to develop roughly five major dialect groups.

[00:04:22]After the divide in 1945, those [clears throat] dialects didn't just disappear. For example, the Hamyong dialect in the Northeast and the Kyong dialect in the Southeast still share a pitch accent system, a feature found in neither North or South Korea's official standard language. Surprisingly, North Korea's standard language is not entirely different from South Korea's.

[00:04:45]This is because both standards developed from the central dialects around Soul, which served as Korea's capital for centuries and became the prestige dialect throughout the peninsula. At the same time, Pyongyang's location near the Pyongan dialect region meant that North Korea's standard language incorporated some northern linguistic features. While the Soul dialect has continued to evolve through ongoing migration from surrounding provinces, the Pyongyang variety has remained more conservative due to North Korea's isolation from outside influences. These differences show up in every aspect of the language from grammar to vocabulary to pronunciation. One of the biggest grammatical differences is how the two Koreas talk about past experiences. In South Korea, I've never been to Soul is while in the North, it's commonly.

[00:05:43]Likewise, the South Korean past tense often corresponds to in the North.

[00:05:50]Vocabulary follows a similar pattern. In the south, the word for confusing is while in the north, it's likewise, South Koreans say for to teach, while North Koreans often use the term instead. Even more fundamental than grammar and vocabulary is pronunciation itself.

[00:06:12]Linguists analyzing the speech of North Korean announcers and defectors have found that the North Korean vowel space is more condensed, making oo sound closer to o and uh sound closer to uh to South Korean ears.

[00:06:28]Together, these differences make the Korean spoken on either side of the border sound increasingly foreign to each other.

[00:06:37]The reality is the division of the peninsula simply separated dialects that had already been changing for centuries.

[00:06:44]And ironically, despite North Korea's attempt to reinvent its language, in some ways it ended up preserving preodern Korean more faithfully than South Korea did. To understand why, we have to rewind the clock to a time when Korea was still under Japanese rule.

[00:07:03]Back in 1933, as Japan sought to suppress the Korean language and assimilate Koreans into the Japanese Empire, the Choson Oh, the Korean language society create a unified spelling system, the Hungarian to preserve the language. And surprisingly, North Korea follows some of those 1933 rules more closely than South Korea does. Take spacing or diosi.

[00:07:30]The 1933 system introduced the general concept of putting spacing between words, but this left the actual rules open to interpretation.

[00:07:38]What exactly is a word? This is a big question that linguists even now have difficulty defining. Over time, South Korea expanded the use of spaces based on grammatical structure, separating modifiers and dependent words more consistently. North Korea, meanwhile, largely kept the older, more compact conventions, writing many of these forms together as a single block. It's another reason you get these monstrosities in North Korean, meaning the total mobilization for the construction of the socialist economy.

[00:08:14]Of course, that's nothing compared to Chinese, where there is literally no spacing between any words. It's a hard knock life for us.

[00:08:23]But North Korea didn't stop at preserving the 1933 standard. In some cases, it went even further back. Take or the initial sound rule. Over the centuries, speakers in the Soul area gradually stopped pronouncing certain Sino Korean words with the initial le and because these sounds had become less natural at the beginning of a word. And since the 1933 spelling system was based on the soul dialect, it officially adopted these spellings, turning historical forms like and into North Korea later rejected this rule, arguing that it obscured the original form of the words. Today, words like and have become some of the most recognizable markers of North Korean speech. To South Koreans, hearing them immediately signals that someone is from the north.

[00:09:19]So you have this language that has been shaped by different layers of societal and political change and strictly governed by a modern dictatorship.

[00:09:28]But there is one thing the North Korean government cannot completely control.

[00:09:34]Its people. There is a massive disconnect between the Korean taught in the North Korean schools and the Korean actual people speak. The truth is you can't just tell an entire nation of 26 million people to say things the way you want them to say it just because the North Korean government has published official replacements for hundreds and thousands of words to avoid foreign influence as much as possible. There are official words for telecommunications and science, basic food items, sports, medicine, you name it. The state can declare that the word for ice cream is literally ice treat, but it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue and the state knows it.

[00:10:26]According to Tongun, a South Korean who has worked at the Ministry of Unification for the past 30 years, many of North Korea's attempts to purify its language only resulted in unnecessary confusion. In many cases, the official replacements never caught on, and the original foreign words eventually won out. Although the state's official message is that it has purified the language, hundreds, if not thousands of foreign loan words remain in use in North Korea today.

[00:10:58]For many years after the division, South Koreans had hoped that they would one day be reunited with their brothers and sisters in the north. They knew, however, that the language on both sides had slowly drifted apart. So, beginning in 2005, scholars and linguists from both Koreas began working together on something called the Korean or the Great Dictionary of the Korean language. The dictionary now roughly contains over 300,000 entries and over the past two decades the committee has met repeatedly to keep it up to date.

[00:11:33]For those of you interested, there is an app created by the Great Dictionary Committee that teaches you about the word usage differences between the North and the South. I'll put a link in the description.

[00:11:46]But with North Korea's 2023 decision to criminalize South Korea ten language, that cooperation has become increasingly difficult. It's impossible to know what the future holds for the Korean Peninsula. But as long as the two Koreas remain divided, their languages will likely continue to drift apart.

[00:12:07]As someone who's lived in South Korea on and off for the past 15 years, North Korea is kind of like this dark cloud hanging over everyone's shoulders.

[00:12:16]Sometimes you think about it and you're suddenly reminded of the everpresent danger. Other times though, you just think about how sad it is that one nation has been split apart like this.

[00:12:26]As a linguist, I'm fascinated by the language changes that have occurred. But I have to say, I'm not surprised that so many foreign languages have been able to slip into North Korea. On the other hand, I do support the two Korea trying to maintain some level of purity in their language. Even in South Korea, there have been several attempts to replace Japanese loan words with native Korean ones. One such word is ulging or fishcake. Because of its widespread use during the Japanese colonial period, is still a super common ingredient in Korean food like everyone's favorite toki. But the government has encouraged Koreans to call it muk instead based on native Korean morphems. The results are mixed. Many young people call it, but many older establishments still have the wording on their menus. In my personal experience, when I first moved to Korea, I called it because that was the term I was more familiar with, but now I call it I guess that's just part of the language assimilation process. You say what you hear. Thank you so much for going through Korea's past 80 years with me. I hope you learned something new today and I'll see you in the next video.