The abrupt political changes, the traumatic measures imposed by force of military mandate on a people, can have unexpected effects visible in the short term and leave wounds that do not heal until long after the end of the discord. We saw it very clearly in the two “Germanies” that the Cold War left us and we see it clearly today in another country: Korea.
Traveling to the present, and although we know the mark that the battle between the capitalist and communist blocs is leaving on the Korean population, there is a dimension of cultural inequality that may have gone more unnoticed: idiomatic.
As a recent study showed, and after just over seven decades of separation, Korean is no longer the same between the north and the south. 45% of the population surveyed He had problems understanding the dialogues of Koreans from the opposite area, and in 1% of the cases the North Koreans did not understand at all what the South Koreans were telling them.
In conclusion, and as linguists dedicated to this company have stated, at least a third of everyday vocabulary is no longer the same, especially that referring to professional and business topics.
This is how their vocabularies have varied
The main difference between both territories is that in North Korea the language has remained purer, with slight grammatical incursions from Chinese and Russian, while South Korean has embraced many neologisms from English without hesitation.
- While over time in South Korea companies have created various terms to say “paper”adapting to new and different formats and materials, in the north the original term is maintained exclusively, which they must use for all variants.
- In the south, and to speak of football terminology, penalty goals are scored with a “penalty kick”expressed literally in English, while in the north the Koreans triumph by making an “11 meter punishment.”
- Southerners, when they want to have a juice, ask for a “juice”, while northerners talk about “sweet fruit water”.
- to wish you “good luck” to someone, those from the south have adopted an English-speaking expression in colloquial speech, “hi-team”something that those from the north do not understand at all.
- North Koreans “have a headache,” while those in the south, who in recent decades have discovered the concept of stress, talk much more about the pain of “suturese”stress in the corrupt slang konglish.
The new lexicons also show the ideological transformation between the two nations, between their political systems and their social structures.
- Since the separation, the word “dongmu”which meant friend, fell out of use in the north in favor of the Soviet term товарищ, “comrade.”
- “Sun-mul”, a term that means “the action of introducing your friend”, is now prohibited from being used among the general population, and its privileged use was reserved for Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong il.
The problematic oral life of deserters
These changes have already had recognizable consequences and it is logical that it becomes a more pressing problem every day. During the 2018 Olympic Games, for example, the two countries decided to launch a reconciliation message to the world by allowing its women’s hockey teams to compete in the same group head to head.
As the athletes from the south commented later, there was quite a few communication problems that harmed their final strategy: apparently, the coach, from South Korea, used technical words in English, something that is most common in sports disciplines anywhere in the world, but the players from the north were not able to follow her lessons because of this vocabulary that, for them, was indecipherable.
Something more serious than the lack of coordination for a sporting event is what many of them have had to experience. the 28,000 deserters who traveled from north to south in recent years. Their language unintentionally betrays them in their new country of residence. In the best of cases the locals They laugh at their outdated dialect. That they do not know how to adapt to the jargon of a post-war and globalized reality. At worst, they can have many problems getting into schools or getting jobs and live a second life as sacrificed as the one they tried to leave behind.
Language preservation: a national trauma
Because, in addition, Korean has great emotional and identity relevance for the 75 million citizens that both fronts have together. After the dramatic occupation of the peninsula by Japanese forces between 1910 and 1945, the locals were subjected to Japanese linguistic norms as a strategy to control the population and eradicate their culture.
They imposed themselves “scientific” speeches that they defended their language was little more than a dialect descended from Japanese (a controversial claim for any linguist with a neutral vision), and that therefore it was not worth preserving a perverted use of a language superior in its purity. T
After the Pacific War, teaching in Korean was strictly prohibited, its vocabulary was extinguished, people who spoke it daily were reprimanded, and intellectuals who tried to preserve its legacy were executed. With the end of the Second World War, the two resulting nations partly had to re-empower their language.
There are attempts to reunify the language
Both governments have been working bidirectionally for several years on a unified glossary project. It is known as the Gyeoremal-kunsajeon, or the Dictionary for People’s Understanding of Korean, and is the plan under which future generations will be educated. These 70 years of linguistic change They have gone much further than the transformation of some terms. There is even conversational structures that have been modified. It would be a change as abrupt as uniting people of a language with those who use one of its dialects.
It is not just the fact that neither of the two States want to give in, it is that any modification of the linguistic structures that are not careful could cement syntactic inconsistencies or phonetics in the future.
The company’s objectives, furthermore, are achieved at irregular rates, since relations between both nations have cooled and heated several times in recent decades. But the efforts continue, since they know that it is very likely that a new union is on the horizon.
“Time has passed and, consequently, the language has evolved,” he commented. Han Yong-unthe director of the aforementioned language project, “and those changes will continue to occur until reunification arrives. By then we will have to be prepared.”
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