The New Korean Orthography was a
spelling reform
A spelling reform is a deliberate, often authoritatively sanctioned or mandated change to spelling rules. Proposals for such reform are fairly common, and over the years, many languages have undergone such reforms. Recent high-profile examples a ...
used in
North Korea
North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), is a country in East Asia. It constitutes the northern half of the Korean Peninsula and shares borders with China and Russia to the north, at the Yalu (Amnok) and T ...
from 1948 to 1954. It added five consonants and one vowel letter to the
Hangul
The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul, . Hangul may also be written as following South Korea's standard Romanization. ( ) in South Korea and Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea, is the modern official writing system for the Korean language. The le ...
alphabet, supposedly making it a more
morphophonologically "clear" approach to the
Korean language
Korean ( South Korean: , ''hangugeo''; North Korean: , ''chosŏnmal'') is the native language for about 80 million people, mostly of Korean descent. It is the official and national language of both North Korea and South Korea (geographic ...
.
History
After the establishment of the
North Korea
North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), is a country in East Asia. It constitutes the northern half of the Korean Peninsula and shares borders with China and Russia to the north, at the Yalu (Amnok) and T ...
n government in 1945, the
North Korean Provisional People's Committee
The People's Committee of North Korea (Chosŏn'gŭl: 북조선인민위원회) was a provisional government governing the Northern portion of the Korean Peninsula from 1947 until 1948.
Established on 21 February 1947 as the successor of the ...
began a
language planning
In sociolinguistics, language planning (also known as language engineering) is a deliberate effort to influence the function, structure or acquisition of languages or language varieties within a speech community.Kaplan B., Robert, and Richard ...
campaign on the
Soviet
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nation ...
model.
Originally, both North Korean and South Korean
Hangul
The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul, . Hangul may also be written as following South Korea's standard Romanization. ( ) in South Korea and Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea, is the modern official writing system for the Korean language. The le ...
script was based on the ''Unified Plan'' promulgated in 1933
under the Japanese.
The goals of the independent North Korean campaign were to increase
literacy
Literacy in its broadest sense describes "particular ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing" with the purpose of understanding or expressing thoughts or ideas in written form in some specific context of use. In other words, hum ...
, re-standardize Hangul to form a "New Korean" that could be used as a cultural weapon of revolution, and eliminate the use of
Hanja
Hanja (Hangul: ; Hanja: , ), alternatively known as Hancha, are Chinese characters () used in the writing of Korean. Hanja was used as early as the Gojoseon period, the first ever Korean kingdom.
(, ) refers to Sino-Korean vocabulary, ...
(Chinese characters).
The study of
Russian
Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including:
*Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries
*Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...
was also made compulsory from
middle school
A middle school (also known as intermediate school, junior high school, junior secondary school, or lower secondary school) is an educational stage which exists in some countries, providing education between primary school and secondary school. ...
onward,
and communist terminology—such as
Workers' Party,
People's Army, and
Fatherland Liberation War—were rapidly assimilated into Korean.
The ban on Hanja in 1949 (excepting parenthetical references in scientific and technical publications) was part of a
language purification movement which sought to replace
Sino-Korean vocabulary and
loanword
A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because t ...
s from
Japanese
Japanese may refer to:
* Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia
* Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan
* Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture
** Japanese diaspor ...
with native
neologism
A neologism Greek νέο- ''néo''(="new") and λόγος /''lógos'' meaning "speech, utterance"] is a relatively recent or isolated term, word, or phrase that may be in the process of entering common use, but that has not been fully accepted int ...
s on the grounds that they were "reactionary" and separated the literary intelligentsia from the masses.
New dictionaries, monolingual and bilingual Russian-Korean, were to be based on the concept of "self-reliance" (''
juche
''Juche'' ( ; ), officially the ''Juche'' idea (), is the state ideology of North Korea and the official ideology of the Workers' Party of Korea. North Korean sources attribute its conceptualization to Kim Il-sung, the country's founder and f ...
'');
place name
Place may refer to:
Geography
* Place (United States Census Bureau), defined as any concentration of population
** Census-designated place, a populated area lacking its own municipal government
* "Place", a type of street or road name
** Often ...
s and
personal names modeled after Chinese naming practices were also purged and replaced with socialist concepts.
In 1948, the ''New Korean Orthography'' was promulgated, along with the ''Standard Language Orthography Dictionary''.
The
Communist Party of Korea
The Communist Party of Korea () was a communist party in Korea. It was founded during a secret meeting in Seoul in 1925. The Governor-General of Korea had banned communist and socialist parties under the Peace Preservation Law (see History of Kor ...
claimed that this New Orthography was the first in
Korean history
The Lower Paleolithic era in the Korean Peninsula and Manchuria began roughly half a million years ago.
Christopher J. Norton, "The Current State of Korean Paleoanthropology", (2000), ''Journal of Human Evolution'', 38: 803–825.
The earliest ...
to represent the language of the
proletariat.
The only publications to use the New Korean Orthography were the linguistics journal ''Korean Language Research'' and the 1949 ''Korean Grammar''.
The language standardization efforts were interrupted by the
Korean War
, date = {{Ubl, 25 June 1950 – 27 July 1953 (''de facto'')({{Age in years, months, weeks and days, month1=6, day1=25, year1=1950, month2=7, day2=27, year2=1953), 25 June 1950 – present (''de jure'')({{Age in years, months, weeks a ...
and hampered by
Kim Il Sung's disapproval of the new orthography.
In March 1958, the new orthography's creator,
Kim Tu Bong, was purged from the Party, and linguistics journals began publishing attacks on him and his system.
From then on, proposals for script reform were restricted to the idea of writing Hangul horizontally, rather than in syllable blocks. Linguistic journals also continued to attack "foreignisms" from Chinese and English (e.g., ''pai pai/bai bai'' , "bye bye").
In the 1960s, Kim Il Sung issued a directive that would bind all future language planning to
Korean ethnic nationalism
Korean ethnic nationalism, or Korean racial nationalism, is a racial, chauvinist and ethnosupremacist political ideology and a form of ethnic and racial identity that is widely prevalent by the Korean people in Korea, particularly in South K ...
, saying that "people of the same racial make-up, the same culture, living in the same territory...
ave a
''Alta Velocidad Española'' (''AVE'') is a service of high-speed rail in Spain operated by Renfe, the Spanish national railway company, at speeds of up to . As of December 2021, the Spanish high-speed rail network, on part of which the AVE s ...
need for a nationalistic, pure standard". Thus,
Pyongan dialect
The Pyeongan dialect (), alternatively Northwestern Korean (), is the Korean dialect of the Northwestern Korean peninsula and neighboring parts of China. It has influenced the standard Korean of North Korea, but is not the primary influence of N ...
was chosen as the
standard dialect
A standard language (also standard variety, standard dialect, and standard) is a language variety that has undergone substantial codification of grammar and usage, although occasionally the term refers to the entirety of a language that includes ...
for North Korean, purely for the reason that it was considered less "contaminated" by foreign cultures and capitalists.
The legacy of the New Korean Orthography lies in North Korea's modern use of Hangul, which reflects
morphology
Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to:
Disciplines
* Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts
* Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies ...
more than pronunciation as it does in the South.
Contents
![NOoK-example](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8a/NOoK-example.svg)
The reason for the reform is that some Korean roots change form and therefore cannot be written with a consistent spelling using standard hangul. The additional letters introduced in the ''New Orthography'' do not represent new sounds, but these situations where a sound changes, say from a to a . Three were created ''de novo'' by modifying existing letters, two ( and ) were obsolete letters, and one () is a numeral.
For example, the root of the verb "to walk" has the form before a consonant, as in the inflection but the form before a vowel, as in and In ''New Orthography,'' the root is an invariable , spelled with the new letter in place of both the in and the in :
Another example is the root of the verb "to heal", which has the form before a consonant, as in but the form before a vowel, as in In some cases, there is an epenthetic vowel before a consonant suffix, as in In ''New Orthography,'' this variable root is written as an invariable , and the epenthetic vowel is not written:
NA’.DA for
NA’.L for
NA’.A for
As with all letters in North Korea, the names follow the formula ''CiŭC.'' For convenience they are also called , and .
The ''New Orthography'' also added two new
digraphs to the lexicon, and .
There were other changes that made the orthography more morphemic, without requiring the addition of new letters. For example, in the word normally spelled (top example in image at right), the politeness morpheme is separated out in its own block. Such spellings can be found in medieval documents, but were not normally seen in the 20th century.
The attributive morpheme at the ends of adjectives is also placed in a separate block, and the occasional epenthetic that appears before it is not written, unlike standard A morphemic is retained before this ending:
HA.YAH.DA "is white",
HA.YAH.N "white" (standard
HA.YAN).
CHOH.DA "is good",
CHOH.N "good" (standard
CHOH.ŬN).
See also
*
Revised Romanization
Revised Romanization of Korean () is the official Korean language romanization system in South Korea. It was developed by the National Academy of the Korean Language from 1995 and was released to the public on 7 July 2000 by South Korea's Min ...
Notes
: Silence
: Makes the following consonant tense, as a final ㅅ does
: In standard orthography, combines with a following vowel as ㅘ, ㅙ, ㅚ, ㅝ, ㅞ, ㅟ
: In standard orthography, combines with a following vowel as ㅑ, ㅒ, ㅕ, ㅖ, ㅛ, ㅠ
References
*
*{{cite book , first=Ross , last=King , chapter=Language, Politics, and Ideology in the Postwar Koreas , editor-last=McCann , editor-first=David R. , year=1997 , title=Korea briefing: toward reunification , publisher=M.E. Sharpe
External links
Proposal to add the "6 letters" (Hangul Jamo)
Korean language in North Korea
Korean writing system
Orthography reform
Writing systems introduced in 1948
1948 establishments in North Korea
History of North Korea