For the last cultural artifact blog post, I wanted to learn more about the different dialects in South Korea. Because my parents were both originally from Seoul, I grew up hearing and learning the standard Korean language, which is called 표준어 in Korean. I remember once during some time in high school, I went over to a friend’s house and met her parents. I was shocked because it was my first time hearing the Gyeongsang dialect. My friend’s parents were from Busan. When they were talking to me, at that time, it felt like I could only understand about half of what they were saying. Unlike the dialects in American English, I think the dialects in Korean are much more different from each other, having distinct grammatical characteristics and completely different phrases.
I learned about the dialects in the following six regions: Gyeonggi, Gangwon, Chungcheong, Gyeongsang, Jeollado, and Jeju, but for this post, I will only focus on the first three. The first region, Gyeonggi, is where Seoul is in, so the dialect here is the standard Korean. A few characteristics of the standard Korean language is that many people tend to change ㅗ sounds to the ㅜ sound. So for example, "먹고 싶다” (meokgo sipda/I want to eat) would be “먹구 싶다” (meokgu sipda). In this case, the “go” in “meokgo” became “gu” so “meokgu”. I find myself doing this all the time. Another characteristic, which I didn’t know about was adding an extra consonant like ㄹ to a word. For instance, “이거로” (igeoro/this one) becomes “이걸로 or 이걸루” (igeollo or igeollu). Do you see the extra consonant? Because this dialect is the standard language, I forget that it is actually a dialect itself.
The Gangwon dialect is used in Gangwon, which is in the Northeastern area of South Korea. This is where the Pyeongchang Olympic was held last year. The people here then to pronounce words with the double ㅆ consonant as if they were a regular ㅅ consonant. So, “쌀” (ssal/rice) is pronounced as “살” (sal). The sound of words like this would become softer. They change theㅏ to the ㅓ vowel when it is at the end of a sentence. For example, “합시다” (hapsida/let’s do this) becomes “합시더” (hapsideo). Also, many different words such as -나, -노, -고, -가 are used to end a question like 비오나? (biona?/is it raining?) Instead of 비 와? (bi wa?).
The Chungcheong dialect is spoken in many various areas, but it is most commonly used in 충청북도 and 충청남도, which are both below Seoul, Gyeonggido. One of its characteristics is that if the last word of a sentence ends with either the ㅐ or ㅔ vowel , it changes to the ㅑvowel. So for example, “피곤해” (pigonhae/I feel tired) is spoken as “피곤햐” (pigonhya). Notice the hae changing to hya. Another example is the word for snake, “뱀” (baem). This changes to 뱜 (byam). Also, if the last word of a sentence ends with 야, it changes to 여. So, “아니야” (aniya/it’s nothing) becomes “아니여” (aniyeo) and “뭐야?” (mwoya?what is it?) changes to “뭐여” (mwoyeo).
Comments
I also talked about how many different dialects there can be in Korean and it is really interesting considering how small of a country geographically Korea is. The diversity of different dialects and the details you gave about the specific differences between many of them is also really interesting.
It is a very interesting post. The first time I heard about Busan accent is in Korean teleplay. Hero's mom is from Busan and when she came to Soul, many people make fun of her accent. Later, though I cannot understand Busan accent, I can differentiate from other accent because Busan accent is really special.
This is mindblowing to me because I feel like there are several Korean words that change their meaning by switching one vowel sound, yet these dialects change the vowels and keep the same meaning. I can definitely understand how it would be difficult to comprehend the other dialects since the words in the examples you showed were so different. It's interesting how varied the way of speaking is in Korean vs. English because I can understand pretty much any different English dialect without too much issue. I am interested to hear some of the dialects when I visit Korea someday.
It's really interesting to see how differently the Korean language can be spoken in different regions of Korea. I have been exposed to some, and I had a rather hard time understanding people sometimes. I think it's nice that there's diversity to the Korean language as it gives character and individuality to different provinces. I think the Jeollado dialect is especially hard to understand.
Before reading your culture post, I only knew Busan has dialect because of TV shows. I learned so much from your culture post! I am curious about these dialects now and I will search how different Korean dialects sound like on Internet. Actually Chinese dialects also sound really different based on the cities. My hometown Jinhua is really close to Hangzhou which is another city in China. However, I cannot understand Hangzhou dialect.
I never knew that there were so many sound change in Korean dialects. I have watched some Korean TV shows which people play games about Korean dialects for fun. I thought it was just the difference of the tone. I remember that in many TV shows people like to imitate the Busan dialect lines in "타짜". It was very interesting to hear Busan dialect because the tone always went up at the end of the sentences. These Korean dialects also reminds of Chinese dialects. Chinese has lots of dialects depending on which city are you in. For me, I speak one of the dialects in the southern part of China. Every time I speak in that dialect, none of my Chinese friends can totally understand what I am saying.
It was great to learn about all the dialects of Korean! I was curious what dialect is spoken in North Korea and if this, too, is not as mutually intelligible as, say, American English. Also, it was interesting to see that Seoul's dialect has become standard - this is also the case in Mandarin, with Beijing's northeastern dialect as the standard one students learn.
This was a really interesting post! I like the amount of detail that went into differentiating between traditional dialect and other regional ones. It was always hard for me to recognize where each dialect was from just by listening by I think your explanation made sense. It's interesting because the differences seem subtle but when I hear then it sounds much more different.
I never knew that Korean had so many dialects! It's cool to see how Korean is spoken in each region and the subtle differences. This kind of reminds me of Chinese, since Chinese has dialects as well. For Chinese, the dialects are pretty much different languages. If someone knows Mandarin, they won't necessarily understand Cantonese. I wonder if that is the same in Korean. Are the differences small enough that everyone is still able to understand each other?