Korean is virtually two languages, which is a problem for North Korean defectors

http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-05-19/korean-today-virtually-two-languages-and-thats-problem-north-korean-defectors

by adamnemecek • 11 years ago

50 59 11 years ago

pri.org

guard-of-terra• 11 years ago

This is called multiple language norms. English is "virtually" a lot of languages.

ptaipale• 11 years ago

Or dialects and vocabularies.

And at least to me (non-native speaker), the most difficult dialects are English. I mean, accents from England. I can usually understand very well people who come from the Indian subcontinent, or China, or Africa... but Manchester? Liverpool?

Northern English dialects perhaps sound funny but for me they are not that hard, despite some describing the Newcastle accent as most difficult.

teh_klev2• 11 years ago

I'm a Scot and as a child was brought up, until around ten years old, in rural north east Scotland. The local tongue around those parts was heavily influenced by Doric [0] (this was the 1970's - we didn't see many "incomers" :) ).

When our family moved to the central belt (Perthshire) no-one in primary school could fully understand half the things I said. I had to learn how to "speak properly" as one fairly unpleasant head teacher put it. My north east accent and pronunciation is but a long lost memory, though I do still have an interest in the "Scots Language" [1][2], or "Mither Tongue" [3] as it's affectionately known.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doric_dialect_(Scotland)

[1] http://www.lallans.co.uk/

[2] http://www.scotslanguage.com/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Kay_(writer)

lordnacho2• 11 years ago

The interesting thing about English in England is class. You know someone went to an expensive boarding school if they speak a certain way. Or, if they come from a place with a strong regional accent, whether they went to private day school.

QuercusMax• 11 years ago

The article title is misleading. From the actual content of the article, there's some differences in accent (and maybe sentence structure?), which can lead to social issues for defectors, but the real issue seems to be vocabulary.

So really it's no different from American English vs British English, except the North Koreans have been cut off from contact with the South.

bane2• 11 years ago

Right. Linguistic unification in the peninsula happened long before the war. Though there are still regional dialects and accents, the North-South split was far less divisive in language terms than this article assumes and has only had a couple generations to occur.

Some interesting things that have happened since the war:

- Korean national identity movements have been strong in both countries. In the North, an effort towards language "purity" has changed some of the vocabulary and eliminated Chinese characters from written communication. In terms of vocabulary, loan-words from other languages were replaced with "pure" Korean words. For example, South Koreans use "computer" (컴퓨터), while North Koreans have used (걔산기) (Gyaesongi) which means something else (though they've started to use 콤퓨터, an almost homophone for the the South Korean word and loaned from English). The article gives another great example with "donut". In the South, a preference to eliminate Chinese writing as a practical matter of preference has happened as well (these days it's pretty uncommon to see outside of maybe newspapers, people just can't be bothered to remember all of the characters), but knowledge of Chinese characters is still highly prized as a matter of scholarship and education. But the South also has more quickly incorporated loan words from various countries and you'll find loads of English and English-like loan words (sometimes filtered through neighboring Japan or China) ending up in the language and written in Hangul all over the place. French is also common, but usually written in Latin characters for commerce reasons.

A recent cooking show on South Korean TV involves teams of two cooks preparing traditional foods, and one of the teams is from the North. There's no trouble communicating with the Northerners, though my wife lets out chuckles on occasion as they let slip stereotypical sounding communist slogans from time to time as they face difficult cooking challenges - "the North has nothing but strength!" as they work a noodle press by hand.

asanagi• 11 years ago

North Koreans have used (걔산기) (Gyaesongi)

Which sounds exactly like Japanese 計算機 (Keisanki) meaning calculator, so why bother eliminating the Chinese writing if you are going to leave the Chinese loaned vocabulary in? Now you're just left with a huge swath of the vocabulary where the roots have become indistinct and impermeable since you eliminated the orthographic clues from the writing. Replacing it with English loanwords seems doubly hare-brained since there's no context for association to learn them with!

All this angst among the Eastern Asian nations over language-historical events that happened a thousand years ago. I bet the Chinese feel real dumb now that they obliterated their own orthographic heritage just in time for computers to come in and make mastery of the written character redundant.

You don't see us fretting over whether we should eliminate the Greek roots or Phoenician lettering from English.

NoMoreNicksLeft• 11 years ago

There's no trouble communicating with the Northerners, though my wife lets out chuckles on occasion as they let slip stereotypical sounding communist slogans from time to time as they face difficult cooking challenges - "the North has nothing but strength!" as they work a noodle press by hand.

Oh my god... that's hilarious to me somehow, and I don't have any connection to Korea.

Is there a website somewhere that I could learn a few of these? I'd like to incorporate them into my repetoire.

getsat• 11 years ago

Maybe it's more specific... like a person from the "southern" USA meeting someone from Wales? They'd have quite a hard time understanding each other.

ubernostrum• 11 years ago

There's more to it than that.

Some English dialects/accents are historically associated with lower-class people, or people perceived to be stupider/lazier/etc. Which creates all sorts of impressions on another person from the instant you open your mouth.

Many southern US accents have these kinds of connotations, for example, to such an extent that A) a lot of people won't take you seriously if you have such an accent and B) I'm glad mine got drilled out of me as a side effect of correcting for a lisp when I was a child.

ZanyProgrammer3• 11 years ago

Are you serious? I'm pretty sure someone from South Carolina would be able to understand the average Welshperson (or anyone in the UK or Ireland)

ZanyProgrammer3• 11 years ago

I agree, I graduated from the Korean Basic Course at DLI, and from what I remember, the main differences between North and South are not that insurmountable from a language perspective. Not having foreign loan words and using more pure Korean (as opposed to Sino Korean) words are the biggest differences. Certainly doesn't make them unintelligible to each other.

616c3• 11 years ago

I cannot say I am surprised. I could talk about Arabic almost every time I comment here. That get's boring. Let's move to Vietnamese.

So one of the coolest co-workers my father had was a recon pilot during the Viewnam War. Not doing the high altitude picture stuff, but SIGINT and comm monitoring over the radio stuff.

He volunteered and went to Nam for the Navy. He was sent to schools stateside to study Vietnamese first, since he did well on the ASVAB, or whatever the hell it was then. While studying with Vietnamese, in DC I think, they would play cards and learn to talk. His first mis-step was crossing his legs, putting one leg on a knee, and showing his instructor the sole of his foot. Super offensive apparently, and off to a more boring instructor he went.

Then, once he was in country on intel flights, almost all of the people in the bases were South Vietnamese, but he is trained to speak Northern, for less than obvious reasons. So this got him into trouble routinely, and made him an issue with on-base stuff. One woman, a cook, on his first day was in the room and he asked "How are you, sister?" In Nothern, this is fine. In Southern, he called her a slut or a whore (someone can back me up on this). She ran out crying, and they needed a new cook.

He said he caused a lot of problems like that. That was the first time.

cageface2• 11 years ago

I've been living in Vietnam for the last four years and there's a huge difference in dialects from southern, central and northern Vietnam. People from the center in particular are often unintelligible even to other Vietnamese. It's a treacherous enough language already since getting a tone wrong can mean you're unintentionally saying something quite vulgar.

Luckily the Vietnamese will almost always give foreigners a pass for making these kinds of mistakes and they're happy that you're even make an effort to learn their language.

chinhodado• 11 years ago

Luckily the Vietnamese will almost always give foreigners a pass for making these kinds of mistakes and they're happy that you're even make an effort to learn their language.

This is correct. It is always expected that foreigners will speak broken Vietnamese, and given that it is already rare in the first place to hear a foreigner speak Vietnamese, most will be delighted to see you do it, no matter how broken it is.

616c3• 11 years ago

No surprise here. I majored in Arabic in college. I have looked into Chinese, Farsi, Hindi/Urdi, Thai, Indonesian, and Vietnamese, in order of effort, with a year of Chinese at college level (in the US that is bullshit, but while doing grad level Arabic, caused people to laugh in conversation at my masochism).

The ASEAN languages, so Thai and Indonesian and Vietnamese, seemed so so much harder than Chinese. Not even sure why.

Mandarin was hard, with 4 tones. I think standard Vietnamese has ... five?

God help me if I ever learned Cantonese Chinese! I actually knew people from the south, and eight/nine tones made me wonder how they fuck people stop learning the language and move onto anything else.

Me: 200 characters of Mandarian

Southern Chinese Dude w/ College Degree: Spoken Cantonense with 9 tones and 20,000 chacters in Mandarin Chinese

Fuck my life.

antjanus• 11 years ago

I'm Czech and I can attest to something similar in my country with its measly 10 million people. There's a Bohemian and a Moravian/Silesian dialect.

Bohemia is part of the country where Prague is and with that dialect, you can fare very well all over the country. You'll stick out, and sound downright silly in the depths of Moravia, but you'll be fine. I can't ever remember not being able to understand a Bohemian simply because most TV shows are dubbed by Bohemians.

But if you're a Moravian (like me), you'll be quite unlucky in the rest of the country. Moravians speak quite quickly and in a deep voice. The language in the thick of it is nearly impossible to understand. There's nothing offensive about it, it just sounds like garbage to any person that speaks the proper Czech language.

dilap• 11 years ago

This reminds me of the Scottish english accent. It's pretty cool sounding (to my west-coast US ears), but a thick Scottish accent can be quite tricky to understand.

gambiting• 11 years ago

Polish has a Silesian accent too(hardly surprising, seeing how the Silesian region changed ownership in the last few centuries), and people with really strong Silesian accent are really really difficult to understand for everyone speaking "normal" Polish.

lordnacho2• 11 years ago

This is interesting. My parents grew up in the north, so I understand when they speak.

The thing is, even if I'm not very good at it and I've never even been there, I can tell what part of Vietnam someone is from. It seems the southern dialect is very easily distinguished from the northern one.

It makes a difference to the diaspora people because it gives you an idea of whether you're of similar background. The exodus seems to have had different stages and groups (eg people who left with the Americans vs Hoa who left a few years later).

scott_s• 11 years ago

The Amana Colonies in Iowa (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amana_Colonies) was settled by Germans, and many continue to speak German. A friend of mine is a professor at the University of Iowa, and a colleague of his grew up speaking German. But, much of her diction sounded quaint to German speakers in Germany; the word she used for "airplane" was closer to the word "dirigible".

alanctgardner3• 11 years ago

French in Quebec is kind of similar - to avoid being assimilated into English Canadian culture, it's very resistant to change. French speakers from Europe tend to find it kind of quaint because it's been developing independently since the 1700s.

simonebrunozzi• 11 years ago

That's a great story. I'm curious about Arabic now - can you tell us more?

nandemo• 11 years ago

I'm not the grandparent but:

Arabic is highly diglossic: in any given area, people use a standard written language called Modern Standard Arabic (used in speech only in certain formal situations) and a local spoke language ("vernacular") used in everyday life. They differ greatly in terms of grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary. Note that vernacular isn't mere slang: it's one's native language.

Also, the vernaculars form a sort of dialect continuum: a Iraqi might have little problem understanding a Syrian from a nearby area, and Syrians might have little trouble understanding Palestinians, and so on, but Iraqi and Moroccan Arabic have little mutual intelligibility.

Neither phenomenon is unique to Arabic. Some Americans speak, say, African American Vernacular English but can also use "standard" American English; of course the difference isn't that big in this case. Brazilian Portuguese is another case of diglossia: the written language has multiple verb tenses and conjugations that aren't used in spoken language, for example.

Dialect continuums also happen in other places, e.g. the Getman speaking countries.

But Arabic is an especially extreme and interesting case (subjectively speaking).

ck22• 11 years ago

I hope to live long enough to see North and South Korea unified like East/West Germany.

But somehow I suspect it is going to be a lot harder for that to happen given the nuclear weapons involved and then learning how southern look down on northern folks.

ZanyProgrammer3• 11 years ago

And the small fact that the North is a totalitarian shithole.

ck22• 11 years ago

100% Chinese sponsored totalitarian sh*thole.

Yet the world keeps supporting China.

kuschku• 11 years ago

East Germany was also not a great place – the largest domestic intelligence agency ever, everyone spying on each other, a totalitarian regime, a wall so that no one could flee, food was there, but you had no bananas, no chocolate, or any other expensive food.

All in all, if one sees it objectively, east germany wasn’t /that/ different from North Korea.

mahouse2• 11 years ago

South Korea is much better. Not.

bkeroack• 11 years ago

This book gives an interesting take on it: http://www.amazon.com/Escape-Camp-14-Remarkable-Odyssey/dp/0...

According to it, the South considers the North so underdeveloped and backward that it isn't worth the cost of unification (which it estimates in the billions). Which makes sense considering that virtually the entire population of the North would require intensive medical care, subsidized housing, assimilation training, etc. Not to mention the cost of rounding up and trying the leadership for decades of crimes against humanity. It's an awful mess.

nashashmi• 11 years ago

I find it interesting the kinds of things one can learn from two countries that are nearly identical, but one is in isolation and the other is not.

That being said, the North Koreans who defect should not feel so embarrassed about their style of speaking. It is unique and appreciable. Hell with the comedians. Just be a good sport and a laugh along. People laugh at others when they find themselves are weak.

stephengillie• 11 years ago

How was it for East Berliners and West Berliners right after the Wall fell? Didn't they have to deal with vocabulary differences as well?

I'd assume that those vocabulary differences have basically disappeared in the decades since, but I've never been there nor studied German. Thoughts?

more_original• 11 years ago

The differences weren't that great. German has a number of distinctive dialects (Bavarian, Saxonian, etc.), and with Saxony in the east, there have been historical differences anyway. The Saxonian dialect has sort of become synonymous with Eastern Germany, even though it's just one of the Eastern dialects. I can think of very few differences that existed due to the separation, mainly just a few brand names that became synonymous with a product in the East, but were not known in the West.

Korean is virtually two languages, which is a problem for North Korean defectors

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