North Korean standard language or () is 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 Korea, Korean Peninsula and shares borders with China and Russia to the north, at the Yalu River, Y ...

n standard version of 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 ...

. Munhwaŏ was adopted as the standard in 1966. The adopting proclamation stated that the

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 ...

spoken in the North Korean capital

Pyongyang Pyongyang (, , ) is the capital and largest city of North Korea, where it is known as the "Capital of the Revolution". Pyongyang is located on the Taedong River about upstream from its mouth on the Yellow Sea. According to the 2008 populatio ...

and its surroundings should be the basis for Munhwaŏ; however, in practice, Iksop Lee and S. Robert Ramsey report that Munhwaŏ remains "firmly rooted" in the

Seoul dialect The Gyeonggi dialect () or Seoul dialect () of the Korean language is the prestige dialect of the language and the basis of the standardized form used in South Korea. It is spoken throughout the Korean Peninsula and in the Korean diaspora, but i ...

, which had been the national standard for centuries. Most differences between the North and South Korean standards are thus attributable to replacement of

Sino-Korean vocabulary Sino-Korean vocabulary or Hanja-eo () refers to Korean words of Chinese origin. Sino-Korean vocabulary includes words borrowed directly from Chinese, as well as new Korean words created from Chinese characters, and words borrowed from Sino-Japane ...

and other

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 th ...

s with pure Korean words, or the Northern ideological preference for "the speech of the working class" which includes some words considered non-standard in the South.

Background

Following the liberation of Korea in 1945, The Democratic People's Republic of Korea continued to follow the Korean language guidelines as defined by the

Korean Language Society The Korean Language Society is a society of hangul and Korean language research, founded in 1908 by Ju Sigyeong. Hangul Day was founded in 1926 during the Japanese occupation of Korea by members of the Korean Language Society, whose goal was to ...

in 1933 with the "Proposal for Unified Korean Orthography" () and in 1936 with the "Collection of Assessed Standard Korean Words" (). In 1954, the 1933 proposal was replaced by a new system () by the North Korean government in which thirteen words were slightly modified. Although the reformation created little difference, from this point the languages spoken by people on both sides on the Korean peninsula only grew in difference. During the emergence of the ''

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 ...

'' idea in the 1960s,

Kim Il-sung Kim Il-sung (; , ; born Kim Song-ju, ; 15 April 1912 – 8 July 1994) was a North Korean politician and the founder of North Korea, which he ruled from the country's establishment in 1948 until his death in 1994. He held the posts of ...

coordinated an effort to purify the Korean language from

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

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 ...

, and

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 ...

loanwords as well as words with less common Hancha characters, replacing them with new words derived from native Korean words. In a lecture by Kim Il-sung on 3 January 1964, titled "Some problems to develop the Korean language" (), he emphasized the significance of the usage of language as a weapon in the socialist construction of all areas of development, and tried to align with the global trend of change as well as preserving ethnic uniqueness. Thus, North Korea began to refer to its own dialect as "cultural language" () as a reference to its return to words of Korean cultural origin, in juxtaposition to South Korea's reference to its own dialect as "standard language" ().

References

{{Portal bar, North Korea, Language Korea, North Korean dialects Korean language in North Korea

Background

See also

References