Result of Isolation

As many of you know, there have been increased tensions between the United States of America and North Korea within the past year or so. We also know that many North Korean citizens have attempted to defect to another country in search of a better life. While many of the attempts to desert the DPRK have ended poorly, there have indeed been many North Korean citizens that have successfully defected to other countries. We know that it must be quite a difficult task to adapt to completely different societies for these North Korean defectors; however, would we have known that there would be quite a challenge involving the Korean language itself?

Recently, I had come across the video, South Korean-North Korean translator, which is a short two-minute video acting as an advertisement for the UniVoca app on smartphones. In the video, we are introduced to two different individuals with one of them being raised in South Korea and the other in North Korea. They are asked to identify a few different items that have completely different words for (or none at all) despite both speaking Korean. While they don't go over a lot of words, it would be safe to assume that many differences between the two exist.

With North Korea being so isolated from the rest of the world, it is understandable that the people of North Korea wouldn't necessarily know things like McDonald's due tensions with America. However, there are words that are completely different despite not having American origins. This is likely a result of South Korea having access to the rest of the world and therefore evolving its language over time. At the moment, you could probably consider North and South Korean as dialects of the Korean language. However, if North and South Korea do not reunite soon, the languages will continue to grow further apart. Eventually, North and South Korean will be completely different languages all together.

The video mentions that North Koreans struggle when trying to read South Korean textbooks as they are able to understand less than 50% of the terms. While North Korean defectors will be able to learn the unfamiliar words, it shows that the languages are rapidly changing from each other. Many of the words that are unknown to North Korean defectors are loan words taken from different countries. Because of North Korea's lack of interaction with the rest of the world, it's clear that these loan words would not necessarily be known to North Korean people.

Now, an interesting thing to think about is how this sort of situation may have happened or could still happen today. For instance, do you remember the Cold War? Germany had been split into two different parts, East and West Germany. However, both pieces of Germany had become reunified once again during 1990, thus, the German language had begun to advance as one. Had Germany been split up for as long as Korea has been, it is safe to assume that a similar outcome in regards to language variation would have occurred as well.

It will be interesting to see how North and South Korea stand in the future (hopefully with an improved relationship), and how their languages develop as well. As it stands right now, it is likely that the North and South Korean dialects will continue to advance further apart, therefore, becoming less and less similar. Will we have two completely different languages that share very little similarities, or will we have a single Korean language with distinct dialects?