Now that that two Koreas have been separated for this “little” bit of time, with very little contact, and one has been ruled by a martinet with little parallel in history, have the accents drifted apart so that the common person could make a distinction based on pronunciation/usage? I can obviously spot an English accent or usage within usually seconds, after a separation of about 200 years. There’s no mistaking the difference, although sometimes I admit I make the ignint American mistake of thinking Australians are British. There are so many British accents (how DO they maintain all those regionalisms?) that I just can’t keep track. Even when I hear many of them, I have trouble telling which are educated and which are street.
Supposedly Michael Caine pointed out that at home, his accent is much more street than posh, but that Americans can’t tell the difference.
South Koreans have told me that they can tell North Koreans from their speaking, but that it is a distinction which has existed since long before the war and political separation. It’s similar to how someone from Seoul can tell from their speech that a person is from Jeju island, though not as distinct. And it’s not just phonological; it involves vocabulary, too, and I believe some of it stems from the political division.
I was in North Korea a few months ago and yes, there are definitely Northern/Southern accents. Not just accents but a few words have distinct pronunciations as well. I don’t speak Korean, but when told, it was fairly easy to distinguish the two at least in simple greetings/expressions.
My Korean is minimal, but there are noticeable differences in dialect just within South Korea. I assume there are similar differences within North Korea and thus differences from southern dialects. Jeju Island has its own very distinct dialect. Even my relatives from southern South Korea can have trouble understanding that dialect at times.
One noticeable difference between language in the Koreas is the use of Chinese characters. The South uses them regularly in formal writing; it’s traditional to use a mixture of characters and the Korean alphabet. The North uses only the alphabet, for ideological reasons, since the Chinese characters were associated with the educated elite.
I would be sure that there’s more to it than “ideological reasons”: using only Hangul (the Korean alphabet) would make the language much easier to read and write.
Easier to read, or easier to learn to read? Japanese is easier to read when written with a mixture of kanji and kana than when written with kana alone.
South Koreans use mostly Hangul - but a lot of our words have their roots in Chinese characters. We don’t use Chinese characters to read and write (unless we’re trying to be super pretentious or fancy).
North Koreans don’t use words rooted in Chinese for the same reason they don’t use words rooted in Japanese or English - they are fanatical about being purely Korean, and they consider words with foreign origins to be tainted.
The North Korean accent is more lilting than the Seoul accent and less harsh than a lot of the more rural accents in South Korea - at least from what I’ve heard. (The newscasters you here aren’t representative of most people.) They actually sound a lot like the Chaoxianzu, the Korean people living in China in what used to be Korean territory, in their accents.
It’s easy to tell a North Korean apart by their accent and their vocabulary, but they wouldn’t be impossible to understand. The gap is more about vocabulary than anything else. A lot of South Korean common everyday words have foreign origins - North Korean words would be unfamiliar but for the most part recognizable (kind of like the relation between American and British English).