Hamgyŏng dialect

The Hamgyŏng dialects, or Northeastern Korean, is a dialect of the Korean language used in southern North Hamgyŏng, South Hamgyŏng, and Ryanggang Provinces of North Korea, as well as the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture of northeast China. It is one of the more divergent dialects of Korean, and contains intonation, vocabulary, and grammatical differences that distinguish it from the standard Korean of the north or south.

Specific vocabulary differences include kinship terminology. For example, "father", in standard Korean abŏji (아버지), becomes abai (아바이) or aebi (애비).^[1]

It is reflected in Koryo-mar, the dialect of Korean spoken by ethnic Koreans in the former USSR, as most of them are descendants of late 19th-century emigrants from Hamgyŏng province to the Russian Far East.^[2] The first dictionary of Korean in a European language, Putsillo 1874's Attempt at a Russian-Korean Dictionary, was based largely on the Hamgyŏng dialect; the author lived in Vladivostok while composing it.^[3]

Notes

Sources

• Kim, German (2007), "Education and Diasporic Language: The Case of Koreans in Kazakhstan", Acta Slavica Iaponica 27: 103–123 
• 곽충구/Kwak Chung-ku (1993), "함경도방언의 (咸鏡道方言) 친족명칭과 그 지리적 분화/Kinship Terms and Geographical Differentiation in the Hamgyong Dialect", 진단학보 76: 209–239 
• Hub, Woong; Kim, Chin-u; Yi, Sang-ok; Lee, Ki-moon; Kim, Jin-p'yong (1983), The Korean Language, Korean Art, Folklore, Language, and Thought 6, South Korea: UNESCO, ISBN 978-0-89209-019-8 
• Putsillo, Mikhail Pavlovich (1874), Опыт русско-корейского словаря, Тип. Гогенфельден, OCLC 78070951