It’s been over sixty years since the country separated.
A lot of technology has been developed and many new words have entered into everyday use.
Even common words in English have changed. My grandparents ate supper in the evening. Most people today eat dinner.
We’re there already several Korean dialects? Has the Korean language evolved into two languages?
I had a Cajun relative that spoke a dialect of French. She could barely make herself understood during a trip to France. I think they said she spoke Old French.
It takes at least a hundred years for two regions to develop accents that are greatly different and at least five hundred years for those accents to be so different that you might want to call them separate languages. Cajun French has been separate from Parisian French for several hundred years.
My guess is that linguistically there is probably little difference. The barriers would likely be in the differences in how they perceive the world (people raised in a democracy vs. a dictatorship) rather than the actual language.
Frequently when people claim that two dialects are so different that the two groups have problems understanding each other, they are exaggerating. Some people enjoy talking about how different people from other places are. They make such claims on first hearing the other people and don’t wait to do the normal adjustments that anyone will do in the first few days of talking to someone to learn the small differences that are normal.
There are still major differences in the worldview of eastern and western Germans even after being politically unified now for more than half the time they were divided.
When I was in Seoul few years ago on business I asked this same question. What I was told is that the written language is essentially the same, but the North Korean language hasn’t changed much in the past 60 years, so lots of words don’t exist there. They said there is definately a dialect and you can easily tell if someone is from the North or South, but they can understand each other in most situations.
Was just reading Escape From Camp 14 – great story BTW – and the author says that smuggled-in copies of South Korean TV shows are available, especially in Pyongyang. He describes the daughters of the NK elite imitating the intonation and slang of SK pop and soap stars.
Escape from Camp 14 presents an extreme version of this: its protagonist was born and raised in a NK prison camp. The concepts of trust and love were utterly foreign to him, vividly shown when
he informs the guards that his mother and brother plan to escape, hoping that he might get a higher rank and better food.
(He also, interestingly, wasn’t indoctrinated politically; since the children born in the camps are going to be used as slave labor until they die, giving them the rudimentary political education needed to indoctrinate them would have been a waste of time. He grew up never having heard of the Kims, or Pyongyang, or “the Americans,” or juche ideology…)
The first article has a possible error in saying North Korea doesn’t teach Chinese characters in school though might resume it. As the article says, teaching Chinese characters is controversial in ROK, and anti-character people tend to exaggerate how much the North has abandoned them. Other info says Chinese character study has always been mandatory in DPRK schools, though has definitely been elective in ROK schools for the last few decades, something a recent education minister wanted to change back to mandatory. But Chinese characters are a reference point to understanding the meaning of Sino-Korean words (ie the majority of words in the language) even if you don’t actually write Korean using them, as well as gateway to learning Japanese and Chinese if you know Korean, which is one of the aspects of the idea of teaching them.
As for the second article, the basic theme is how relatively short it is and how many of the clearly identifiable differences are trivial (eg. what order the vowels come in the dictionary). And the difference in transliteration to Latin letters, different systems used in ROK v DPRK, while it affects most place names and people’s names likely to be transliterated, is not directly an issue for the language itself.
In simple terms as moderately capable non-native speaker I would say the difference in written language is trivial. It’s no more difficult for me to understand a given DPRK than ROK news story, or the variation in difficulty depending on the topic is greater than the variation depending where it was written. DPRK media has its infamous stilted, ‘purple prose’ style and vocabulary (those aren’t just artifacts of translation to English), but the style of various stuff written in ROK differs also, and vocabulary differs depending on topic as in any language.
The difference in spoken language is a little more significant. Sometimes when DPRK people are shown speaking on ROK TV there are subtitles. However, they also sometimes do that for people in the ROK with rustic accents. And that’s something like when subtitles are used for a general English speaking audience when the speaker has say a heavy Scottish accent (or maybe on Scottish TV they use subtitles for people with nondescript eastern/northern US accents like me, who knows ). It doesn’t require anything like a ‘separate language’ for accents to make it hard to pick up some words in an accent you’re not accustomed to hearing.
Plus, once the difficulty becomes truly problematic, don’t we usually call them different languages? And by “we”, I mean linguists, not lay people. Doesn’t there have to be some level of mutual intelligibility for two language groups to be called dialects of the same language? And of course, I think a lot of people exaggerate the precision with which such distinctions can even be made in the most objective of circumstances. We want things to fit neatly into boxes, but the natural world doesn’t care so much about boxes.
One thing to keep in mind, though, is whether or not such dialectical differences existed prior to partition. Even a country as small as SK + NK typically has a number of dialects that exist across its territory, unless that country was only recently populated from somewhere else. It would be useful to look at the Dialect Map of the Korean Peninsula circa 1940 before making assumptions about what dialectical differences emerged since then.
Thanks for the book recommend- I’ve read a fair amount of material written by NK defectors and the stories are interesting. I’m not at all sure that they are typical - the defectors seems to be largely from areas that border with China or they had privileges that gave them more mobility within the country.
But I’m not sure that these Western influences are there in areas that are more “inland” and out of reach of TV and radio transmissions.
And as for the language it get the impression that NKers usually have a distinct accent (I’ve heard the word guttural used to describe it). I’ve read accounts of refugees boarding planes in China bound for SK with fake papers and how they avoid speaking en-route because the accent is a tell. But once they are on SK soil they are able to make themselves understood when the declare their intention to defect.
These defections are fairly common and SK recognizes NKers as citizen and will give them stipends and put them in programs to assimilate them.
This book -The Girl with Seven Names- was really interesting. The woman that wrote the story was a very privileged North Korean (as such things go), she came from a family of smugglers that lived right on the river that borders with China.
She really didn’t even intend to defect. She was a rebellious teenager that wanted to go to China for a visit - she had family members that made the crossing all the time. So she made the crossing without family permission then something happened when she was gone and the government became aware she was gone. Her family managed to get word to her that she could never come back.
She was so assimilated that when she made her way to SK she had trouble convincing them she was North Korean.
Political separation often leads to exaggeration of difference. I once had dinner with a Serbian, and a friend originally from Georgia (partly Atlanta, partly Savannah). We asked the Serbian how different really were Serbian and Croatian. He hesitated, then sighed and said that it was less then the difference between the two of us. But both sides like to exaggerate the difference and of course they use different alphabets. Although, he also commented that when he was growing, the Serbs were using both alphabets and the roman more and more, but that since the breakup, this had reversed.
Even between different languages, there’s often some degree of mutual intelligibility. A native Spanish speaker and a native Portuguese speaker can probably make each other understood, if they speak slowly and allow for “wait, what did you say?”. To a large degree, it’s even true of Spanish or Portuguese and Italian (I’ve heard Spanish-speaking friends describing Italian as “a really bizarre accent”).
Linguists sometimes consider Hindi and Urdu to be dialects of a single language, although every native (or even second-language) speaker of either one that I’ve ever talked to insisted that they were separate and mostly unintelligible. (They are of course also written in different scripts).
On the other hand, the national anthem of India is written in Bengali but in such an elevated “register” of Bengali that even non-Bengali speakers can usually understand it.
They did, and are still recognized as existing, even within NK from SK POV. For example see this clip from ROK TV show where they illustrate. The Hamgyeong region, now northeast NK, was and is known for a distinctive accent which the lady initially seating on the right comes out and demonstrates. The audience first reacts to her pronunciation of the common grammatical ending ‘요’ normally transliterated ‘yo’, from her it’s more of an ‘oh’ and long. Then in a later segment the guy in suit jacket is speaking with a Chungcheong (now central SK) accent. Hardly a different language, more like South Carolina v New York if even that different.
People’s attitudes in terms of what they say could be a lot different between the two Korea’s but that’s really a different thing than the language itself. But because the ROK really does still speak the same language as the DPRK, knowledge of the ROK via DVD’s is said now to be pretty universal in NK which it didn’t use to be. It’s not limited to elites or Pyongyang, though presumably doesn’t extend to the relatively small % of the population actually held in prison camps. Knowledge of the ‘west’ beyond the ROK in contrast is limited by language.
I’m a Spanish speaker, and can make decent sense of Portuguese while reading it. Speaking is entirely different, and I can’t make heads or tales of spoken Italian or Portuguese. My dialect is south Texas Spanish, and perhaps if I spoke Castilian I might be able to understand spoken Italian or Portuguese, but for me at least the spoken languages are unintelligible.
Chinese characters were also the reference point in the debate between supporters modernism and nationalism, vs admireres of the aristocratic divioions as an embodyment of traditional Confucianism. It’s not a context free debate.
). It doesn’t require anything like a ‘separate language’ for accents to make it hard to pick up some words in an accent you’re not accustomed to hearing.