opinion

The cultured Pyongyang dialect is a very advanced form of language in terms of linguistic structure and social functions.

Its advantage is that it contains all excellent elements of the Korean language in all aspects of linguistic structure and has been refined and developed in keeping with the feelings and sentiments of the people.

It is a pure language form polished by developing native Korean in line with the requirements of the present times.

Its advantages are found in all aspects of linguistic structure including speech sound, vocabulary configuration and grammar.

In terms of speech sound, it is rich, fluent and distinct in pronunciation and its intonation is being developed to be more impressive and pleasing to the ear.

The cultured Pyongyang dialect has well-regulated systems of vowels including monophthongs and diphthongs and consonants with the distinct contrast system of mild and aspirated sounds and fortes.

By means of its cultured pronunciation with a well-organized speech sound system and developed and copious pronunciations, you can easily and sufficiently say the words of all languages in the world.

Its intonation has been developed into soft, beautiful and vibrant one.

Its stress has been formed and developed in such a way as to display the national characteristics of smooth Korean intonation with no abrupt change in pitch and its lengthening has been made to play a supporting role of preserving its expressive effects. Therefore, overall pronunciation is gentle, vibrant, refined musically and pleasing to the ear.

In terms of vocabulary configuration, the cultured Pyongyang dialect is rich in words and expressions and is being polished in line with the emotion of the masses of the people.

Its vocabulary configuration has been enriched as lots of new words have been coined according to the historical environment of socialist construction and the sentiments and demands of the people and good dialectal words have been included in it.

Its vocabulary has been rearranged by focusing on native words and words favoured by the people to make the overall vocabulary configuration a people-oriented one displaying the national characteristics of Korean and embodying the Juche character and cultural refinement.

The cultured Pyongyang dialect is also a very advanced language form with developed grammar.

As it is well-built in all aspects of grammatical structure and well-polished in grammatical norms, it can express any complex thoughts and feelings accurately, clearly, richly and delicately.

In particular, tho, a kind of suffixes peculiar to Korean, is rich, diverse and finely developed.

Korean has more than 600 tho which correctly show various grammatical relations between words in sentences and they are combined in a very orderly manner and therefore it can splendidly express any complex ideas and delicate feelings.

The cultured Pyongyang dialect has better means and methods of showing etiquette than any other languages, which is very instrumental in education of people in communist morality.

It has words for showing respect to listeners and subjects of conversation and those used between friends and for juniors, and lots of means and methods of clearly showing the speaker’s manner according to situations and circumstances. So, it plays a significant role in promoting social unity and harmony and establishing good moral traits of helping and leading one another forward.

The cultured Pyongyang dialect fully embodies normative qualities, free from provincial dialects and other uncivilized linguistic elements, and therefore takes a big part in enhancing the linguistic cultural standard of people and establishing a noble and cultured way of linguistic life in society.

It is a source of pride for our nation to have the cultured Pyongyang dialect.

An Sun Nam, department chief of the Linguistics Institute of the Academy of Social Sciences