Korea's other language, Jejueo
Fifteen years ago, UNESCO classified Jejueo, the language of Korea’s Jeju Island, as “critically endangered,” entering it into the Atlas of World’s Languages in Danger. At that time, they estimated 5,000 to 10,000 fluent speakers remained. All were likely over the age of 75. Scholars Yang Chang-yong, Yang Se-jung and William O’Grady estimate that the number is closer to “far less than 1,000” fluent speakers today. That’s a sobering thought.
The precarious decline of Jejueo highlights a global trend of language extinction. In his book "Language City," linguist Ross Perlin, the co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, takes us on a journey to New York City, another epicenter of this crisis, where he examines the fight to preserve mother tongues. Like many Americans, Perlin started life as a monolingual but descended from Yiddish speakers. Coincidentally, his introduction to endangered languages came in the East, specifically Beijing, while studying Mandarin Chinese. He first heard of endangered languages from the famed linguist Sun Hongkai, who’s documented as many of the 300 languages as possible throughout greater China. A linguist’s census of and love letter to New York, a Tower of Babel with over 700 languages, his book is a freewheeling, exuberant, exhilarating, rapid-fire and garrulous tour of this “polyglot port of minority peoples.” (New York is “the most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world,” Perlin claims grandiloquently. Call it the American prerogative, this propensity to heavily exaggerate). In addition to capturing the city’s linguistic past and present, he spotlights six speakers of six endangered languages and the language revivalists who are bringing these languages back.
NYC isn’t just muscular Manhattan, whose name means “a place where we get bows” from the original Lenape peoples’ language, or Brooklyn where the artists strive, but most quintessentially embodied in and by Queens’ working-class, multilingual immigrants. Queens also just happens to have a Korean enclave, congregating along “the kimchi belt” that is Northern Boulevard, though it’s not the focus. “Nowhere on the planet, square mile after square mile is more linguistically diverse,” Perlin writes of this easternmost borough. By “linguistic diversity,” I suppose he means both the pure number of spoken languages and the widest possible range of people from all over the world.
The Koreas, by contrast, are so tightly trapped in the Cold War framework of North and South, communist and capitalist, that linguistic diversity is harder to identify here. It is so often perceived as a threat.
But linguistic diversity in South Korea does exist, despite the southern government’s best efforts to eliminate it in April 1948. It lives in Jejueo. (The Manchurian borderland also deserves far more attention and examination for its very metal Manchu script, migrants, missionaries and warlords. The same goes for Okinawa and Sakhalin). Linguists argue, of course, that this Jeju dialect is truly a language because it cannot be understood by Korean mainland speakers. In other words, these languages are “mutually unintelligible.” Besides, “a language is a dialect with an army behind it.”
For over 500 years, Jeju Island existed as a separate kingdom, known as Tamna. Its language contains only faint traces of Mongolian vocabulary, mostly related to horses.
American linguists like O’Grady and Moira Saltzman have worked for years with local citizens, scholars and poets on the island in documenting and revitalizing Jejueo. So far, there’s the Jeju Language Preservation Society, a grassroots organization that has created a talking dictionary as well as the Jeju Dialect Institute. The island’s public schools incorporate the language into the curriculum. The first full-length English treatment of Jejueo was published in 2019. These are significant steps. The most vital progress will come from continued government compensation, or reparations, for Jeju Island's massacre victims and their families since 2022.
After 1948, more Jejueo native speakers fled to Osaka, Japan, where many reside in Ikuno Ward. Despite generations in Japan, some are stateless or, by a tragic twist of geopolitics, North Korean nationals who’ve never stepped foot in North Korea.
The longer the war persists, the more the language of the north and south diverges, broadening the ideological chasm into a communication gap. For now, however, the languages are still intelligible.
South Korean people, being the proverbial shrimp among whales (larger neighboring nations), learn the dominant languages in school: English, Japanese and Chinese.
So, too, the Korean language reflects the older flow of power. Korean sometimes sounds like Cantonese, which is a closer descendant of Old Chinese and Middle Chinese that were spoken before Mandarin, the northern dialect, assumed hegemony. Just ask a Cantonese speaker how they say “student.” And with the country’s GDP rise, South Korea’s multinational factories worldwide create enclaves that interact, albeit in a limited fashion, with local languages from Saudi Arabia to India to Vietnam.
Linguistic diversity is on the upswing domestically as migrant workers and migrant brides from predominantly Southeast Asian countries (Vietnam, China, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia) settle down in the country for economic opportunities, care for Korea’s officially "super-aged" society, and will effectively save the nation from falling off the demographic cliff. If South Korea needs migrants, it must create the infrastructure to support them. Including languages in the census may prove helpful.
K-pop, K-dramas and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism have elevated our language into a global one. But I only fought to learn this mother language of mine to access the stories of my grandparents and not rely on the colonizers.’ By this same logic, Jejueo should also be recognized firstly as a language, not a dialect, by the National Institute of the Korean Language. The government’s compensation to Jeju survivors is the smallest, first step to recovering and then fostering cultural and linguistic heritage. All people deserve access to the stories, lullabies and memories of their parents, grandparents and ancestors.
Esther Kim is a writer from New York living in Taiwan. She is working on her first book.