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To understand the language situation in Korea, let's imagine that we divided the Italian peninsula in half just north of Rome. Does it follow that now there are two dialects, North Italian and South Italian? No. Italian has a bewildering variety of regional dialects, and our arbitrary line doesn't correspond to a genuine dialect border. Similarly, the DMZ cuts across the central dialect region in Korea.

More importantly, Italians will continue to write and be taught in Standard Italian, which was developed based on the Tuscan dialect long before our artificial division of the peninsula. It won't be as if they would start from scratch and create new standard languages based on the Milanese dialect in the North and the Roman dialect in the South. Even independent countries such as Germany, Austria and Switzerland find it useful to use the same standard German as each other, even if it's not necessarily based on a dialect spoken wothin their borders. There will inevitably be differences in vocabulary and spelling, but the differences will be far less than if we imagined a naïve model where each country creates its own standard (which is what basically happened in Scandinavia).

Your comparison of Korean to Italian isn’t helpful, because you’re confusing dialects and languages. Italy has many regional languages including Piedmontese, Lombard, Venetian, Sicilian, Sardinian, Neapolitan, etc., and of course Italian (based on the Tuscan language). Each regional language has many dialects, so for example in Piedmont you have the Turinese dialenct of Piedmontese from Turin, which is distinct from the Piedmontese dialect in other areas. The dialects vary substantially, from one village to another—even different suburbs of a city can have different words for certain things.

Confusingly, Italians would call Piedmontese or Lombard a “dialetto” as much as they would call Turinese a “dialetto”. The word basically means a dialect or regional language, depending on the context. There is also a political element to it—the Italian government has suppressed the regional languages for years, and even now does not recognise them as languages, against academic opinion.

To be clear, Italians would also (generally) refer to Welsh as a “dialetto” of English, despite the fundamental difference of Welsh and English. (In fact they would usually also often refer to the U.K. as “inghilterra”.) The word “dialetto” as currently used in normal Italian speech simply does not correspond 100% with the English word “dialect”, much like the word “camello” doesn’t correspond to “camel”.

The regional languages generally are not mutually intelligible, although this depends on which dialects two speakers speak, and how “stretto” (strong) the dialect is (I don’t know what the academic term for this is). So for example Vercellese (from Vercelli) is linguistically close to Novarese (from Novara) even though Vercellese is classed as Piedmontese and Novarese is classed as Lombard (despite being a Piedmontese city). The distinction is ultimately arbitrary—there is a gradation of dialects from Piedmontese to Lombard. Vercellese for example has many grammatical elements of Lombard (e.g. it uses the Lombard lü (meaning “he” or “him”) instead of the Piedmontese chiela).

Also, an older or more rustic speaker is more likely to speak a “stretto” dialect, because they’ll use more words and expressions originally belonging to that dialect (or to the regional language). Over the years, the regional languages have absorbed many words from Italian, replacing the traditional words. Now, the same thing is happening to Italian with English words (e.g. the word “goal” replacing “rete”, or “babysitter” replacing “tata”, or “shopping” replacing “spesa”—the English word in each case sounds more modern or cool to Italian speakers).

The linguistic situation is basically the same as with Catalan and Spanish. Catalan is as much a “dialect” of Spanish as Piedmontese would be a “dialect” of Italian. In fact, you could just as rightfully say that Italian is a “dialect” of Piedmontese. The difference is political, not academic.

I am well aware of the language situation in Italy, and I hesitated a bit before using it as an example. I probably should have qualified my use of the word "dialect" as you rightly point out. I do remind people from time to time that the regional languages in Italy are languages in their own right, and indeed the "dialects" spoken in Italy don't form a natural subgroup of the Romance languages, either (Piedmontese and Lombard are probably closer to the subgroup of the Western Romance languages that includes French rather than the one that contains Italian). But for my point here the distinction between languages and dialects is not important. The point is that in all of Italy, regardless of the local dialect or regional language, people are taught standard Italian. If we divide Italy, the Southern half is not going to switch to, say, Neapolitan, or the Northern half to Lombard, in spite of the rich literary traditions of these regional languages.

The situation in Korean is not qualitatively different, either. For instance, the Jeju "dialect" (now sadly moribund) is definitely not mutually intelligible with other dialects of Korean some authorities would insist on classifying it as a separate language. Even the mainland dialects (as they are traditionally considered as opposed to distinct languages) are considerably different from each other, not just in lexical items but in the existence of different grammatical categories (e.g. distinguishing between yes/no and wh-questions), morphology (the conjugation of verbs and adjectival verbs is all different), and phonology (different consonant and especially vowel inventories, different stress/pitch systems), to the degree that I wonder how much communication would be possible if it had not been for the imposition of standard Korean.

I used Italy as an example instead of the U.S., because it is a stretch to say that the U.S. has different dialects as the speech is quite uniform across the vast country compared to what you see in Korea; or the U.K., where the existence of Scots complicates the analogy. I did not intend to minimize the diversity of regional languages in Italy.

In the case of Italy, I would also doubt (as you do) that a hypothetical “North Italy” would choose anything other than Italian as its official language, because the use of Italian goes back a lot further than the unification of Italy, and it’s the obvious and easy choice as a national language. The government simply doesn’t care about the regional languages dying out, and there’s no reason to think that a new North Italian government would have a different viewpoint. The main motivation, in the case of Italy, was just to have everyone speaking the same language.

However, it’s certainly possible for a country and a population to completely change language in a generation. The Italian generation of people that is now about 60 years old are effectiviely bilingual—they were taught in Italian at school, but (generally) spoke their regional language at home. The generation after that spoke only Italian, and the generation before that spoke only the regional language. (Obviously this is a bit of a generalisation.) So it’s quite straightforward for a country to change it’s language over the course of 20 years or so.

I have a colleague in the Netherlands who believes that the Netherlands will at some point adopt English as its official language. I personally doubt it, but it is nevertheless definitely possible. All it would take is for the government to decree that all schoolchildren be taught in English at school. Dutch people (and particularly Dutch school-teachers, which is the important thing) would easily be able to carry that policy out. The first generation of schoolchildren to pass through to adulthoold would probably choose to speak in English as their primary language, as has happened in Italy.

Also Brussels has changed from a Flemish speaking city to a French speaking one in a short space of time.

From what I remember, the main differences between the DPRK and ROK in terms of language are that the North doesn't use Sino-Korean words ("pure" Korean tends to predominate), and the vast majority of post-war loan words obviously aren't used.

You've got the gist, but North Korea does use tonnes of Sino-Korean words, which are like words of Greek and Latin origin in English. You can't simply eliminate such words from the language altogether. What you can do is to favour pure Korean words over Sino-Korean when coining new terms or standardizing terms for technical usage. So North Korea might use a bit less Sino-Korean than the South (I'm not even sure though, because there are other factors such as loanwords in South Korea displacing Sino-Korean words there). But this makes barely a blip on the language as a whole since so many basic words in Korean are Sino-Korean. Even most North Korean terms you're ever likely to hear are Sino-Korean: Juche, Son'gun, Chollima, Rodong missiles...

To add on to this: In South Korean newspapers you'll often find Hanja (the original Chinese characters) on news sites or in the paper or even on the news. It may be simply to clarify a phrase, or for when someone has passed away, there's a character for that. So South Koreans may not know a lot of Chinese characters, but they know the basics and they are quite aware where many words come from-- In North Korea to emphasize their Korean-ness they have little to none of these Hanja anywhere, they don't learn it in school like a South Korean child would, either.

On top of this, you'll find that those English loanwords are almost nonexistant in North Korea. Where South Koreans will simply say "Ice cream", North Korea has the word "얼음보숭이" which literally translates to "ice fluffly thing".

There's also differences in the speech styles (a very complicated and extensive topic in itself) and verb endings. NK prefers some styles where SK prefers others-- But like it was said farther up, the difference really comes down to something like US/British English, obviously different but still very mutually intelligible.

Actually, they do teach Chinese characters in school in North Korea; it is a common misconception that they don't. They teach 3,000 characters, which is numerically even more than the 1,800 characters taught in South Korea in school. But as you said, in North Korea you don't even see the very limited usage of Chinese characters in newspapers that you see in South Korea, so it is not much beyond a subject you learn in school. You could say the same about the situation in South Korea, though, since the usage of Chinese characters is really, really limited, mostly to certain newspapers.

The notion that North Koreans say 얼음보숭이 (ŏrumbosung'i) for "ice cream" is a bit of a myth. The authorities in North Korea did indeed introduce this word as a part of a linguistic purification effort, but it doesn't really seem to have caught on. A 1962 North Korean dictionary only has 아이스크림 (aisŭk'ŭrim) "ice cream", just as in South Korea. A 1981 edition of another dictionary and a 1984 encyclopedia introduce 얼음보숭이 (ŏrumbosung'i), but the official dictionary that appeared in 1992 again has 아이스크림 (aisŭk'ŭrim) "ice cream" and not 얼음보숭이 (ŏrumbosung'i). The 1992 dictionary also has 에스키모 (esŭk'imo) "eskimo", which in North Korea is a popular everyday word for "ice cream" which comes from a name of a brand that was popular there.

You have plenty of examples of South Korean language authorities introducing "purified" (often pure Korean) words to replace loanwords, which don't necessarily catch on. For "stapler", the official South Korean dictionary has the pure Korean translation 찍개 (jjikgae), for instance. But I have never seen this term in the wild—instead, people say 스테이플러 (seuteipeulleo) "stapler", or more commonly, 호치키스 (hochikiseu) "Hotchkiss". There is a limit to how much official language policy can dictate actual usage, whether it is in North or South Korea.

Well fancy that-- Everything I knew was a lie!

Would you happen to know anything about the usage of konglish in North Korea then, as in words besides 아이스크림 or 에스키모? Is it more frequent near the border or just as spread through as it is in SK?

Are you talking about loanwords from English in the Korean used in North Korea? Korean was already borrowing words from English decades before the division of the peninsula, as you can see in writings from the Japanese colonial period. So North Korea inherited a lot of these same loanwords. It has nothing to do with South Korean influence, if that's what you're suggesting, as the language communities of the North and South have been effectively cut off from each other since the war.

However, there are often differences in the spelling of such loanwords between the North and the South. So you have 프로그람 (p'ŭrogŭram) in the North but 프로그램 (p'ŭrogŭraem) in the South for "programme", 텔레비죤 (t'ellebijyon) in the North but 텔레비전 (t'ellebijŏn) in the South for "television", and 미싸일 (missail) in the North but 미사일 (misail) in the South for "missile". This is due to the fact that the standardized spelling of loanwords (a problematic and much debated area of Korean orthography) was frequently reformed in South Korea, and probably in the North as well, so the principles of spelling have turned out quite differently between the two. Also, as North Korea uses a lot of loanwords from Russian, even loanwords originally from English tend to be absorbed in the Russian pronunciation, such as 땅크 (ttangk'ŭ) for "tank" or 뜨락또르 (ttŭrakttorŭ) for "tractor" as opposed to SK 탱크 (t'aengk'ŭ) or 트랙터 (t'ŭraekt'ŏ) which is closer to the English pronunciation.

The official language policy in both the North and the South tends to discourage loanwords from English, but it seems a bit more successful in the North, especially when it comes to post-1945 loanwords. If you only focus on the differences between the North and the South, then you see many cases where North Korea uses native Korean words whereas South Korea uses loanwords from English. But you can't extrapolate from that and conclude that North Korea doesn't use loanwords from English at all. This would be a misconception, just like the false notion that North Korea doesn't use Sino-Korean words.

I wasn't implying at all that the North's use of loanwords was due to the South, I was asking how widespread are the English loanwords around the border compared to the far far North. -- Because the South has embraced loanwords much more than the North, would it be not uncommon to possibly hear 찍개 somewhere in the North as opposed to 스테이플러.

Didn't know about the Russian pronunciation thing, is 도꾜/도쿄 also included in that?

Sorry for the late reply as I didn't see this until now.

There is no reason for there to be a difference in English loanword usage in North Korea between the border area and the far far North. Remember, the DMZ is a tightly sealed border and there has been virtually zero cross-border exchange that would influence the language since the Korean War. If we were talking about normal national boundaries with some cross-border linguistic exchange then there would be a gradient of linguistic features taken from the neighbouring state near the border and diminishing as you move away from it, but with the DMZ there is no such thing.

찍개 is a recent South Korean neologism for 'stapler'. There is no reason that North Korea would use the same word. I don't know what they call staplers in North Korea, though.

Once again, the point is that English loanwords were being used in Korean before the division of the peninsula, and afterwards, North and South Korea followed completely separate paths of linguistic evolution. There was no way for people near the border regions to be influenced by what people were speaking on the other side. You might flip the question and ask whether South Koreans near the DMZ are more likely to use pure Korean words due to North Korean influence, and again the answer is no for the same reasons.

도꾜 is the traditionally common spelling for Tokyo that is based on maximum phonetic similarity. In South Korea, the spelling was reformed to 도쿄 to conform to standardized rules about how to write Japanese loanwords, where all non-initial "k" sounds were to be mapped to ㅋ. So this is more of a phonemic spelling. Roughly speaking, "phonetic" refers purely to the sounds, while "phonemic" goes into the more abstract level of grouping the sounds that are considered mere variations of a single sound to the speakers of that language. However, due to widespread resistance, the South Korean reform didn't go all the way in making it phonemically regular—otherwise, we would be writing 토쿄 instead, using ㅌ everywhere for "t" (in concession to the traditional practice, we write ㄷ for initial "t").

This reform took place in the 1980s in South Korea, and didn't affect North Korea, which still writes 도꾜 for Tokyo. It has nothing to do with Russian pronunciation. If we imitated Russian pronunciation, it would come up as something like 또끼오 or even 또끼워.

Place names side, I like that Korean orthography is morpho-phonemic rather than striving for purely phonemic spelling. The same morpheme tends to be spelled the same everywhere it's used, which promotes reuse and actually tends to make writing in bulk easier. It also isolates the written word from shifts in pronunciation over time a little more, something that hangul otherwise runs into problems with anyway.

In practice the orthography is sort of a middle step between the hanja spelling for many morphemes and their pronunciation. Multiple hanja end up mapping to the same hangul block because they're homophones, so there's some information loss, but spelling is morphemic enough that you can recognize the same morpheme in different arrangements. If you can guess what hanja it might be though you can often understand a word more deeply.

" if someone uses a British English locale, that isn't proof that it can't be an American" -- I'd take that further and ask, if this was such an advanced attack, wouldn't a bit of language misdirection be thrown in?

On a somewhat unrelated note, some people believe this is what the founder of Bitcoin did.

> Both his forum posts and his comments in the bitcoin source code used such Brit spellings as optimise and colour.[1]

1: http://www.wired.com/2011/11/mf_bitcoin/all/

Sigh, sounds very familiar, like what people say about Mandarin and Cantonese, those who don't know.

This is a different hack, but I think they more reliably differentiated between North Korea and South Korea, due to the IP addresses? "Korea seeks U.S. help in reactor hacking probe" http://m.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20141222001202&ntn=0

From what I've seen in the South Korean media, no one is talking about North Korean involvement in this separate hacking incident of nuclear reactors. The codes seem to be different from those used in previous attacks blamed on North Korea.

Note that linguistic evidence doesn't come into this, just as one wouldn't usually be speculating about which English-speaking country a hacker was from simply based on the code.

A good writeup on explaining the language diversity in the Korean peninsula.

What's interesting about North Korea is that they force Korean words on everything. For example, a word will spell the same in South Korea and can only be differentiated by context, intonation and use of chinese characters. Newspapers in South Korea is a good example of this as it almost requires a basic knowledge of traditional Chinese characters. North Korea seems to have none of it and has a political agenda to "purify" the language and it leads to lot of weird looking Korean words and leads to confusion.

Kaesong was also the capital a long ass time ago during the Koryo dynasty which was overthrown in a coup and Chosun dynasty was created by a general (we'll see the same thing in 1960s creating the modern ROK). The longest reigning and oppressive regime. North Koreans still refer to themselves as Chosun people and much of modern Korean identity lends from this era. The word Korea also comes from Koryo or Coree in French.