“Nationalism and Language Reform in Korea: The Questione della lingua in Precolonial Korea (original) (raw)
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This paper examines the relationship between nationalism and language reform in Korea, focusing on the vernacular beliefs surrounding the Korean language, its historical development, and the socio-political factors contributing to its reform. It highlights the impact of King Sejong's linguistic contributions and the subsequent struggles against hegemonic ideologies that favored foreign scripts and languages. Moreover, the paper explores how the quest for a standardized Korean language reflects broader themes of national identity, cultural pride, and historical narratives.
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Journal of Korean Studies, 2017
The first attempt at spelling reform in South Korea took place in the early 1950s as the Korean War (1950–53) drew to a close. The subsequent Han’gŭl Crisis is often interpreted as an example of the authoritarianism of President Syngman Rhee (Yi Sŭngman), yet the event also represents a clash of generations between the supporters of the Unified Orthography of 1933 and the previous spelling standard. During the han’gŭl simplification debates, the legacies of Chu Sigyŏng (1876–1914) and Pak Sŭngbin (1880–1943) reemerged as their followers continued a contentious linguistic debate that stretched back into the colonial period. The event ended as a victory for the Unified Orthography of 1933, but several ambiguous questions remain for further investigation. Ultimately, behind the claims of “scientific rationalism” in the current han’gŭl spelling are the forgotten memories of linguistic activism and the difficulties in uniting divergent linguistic practices in post-Liberation Korean society.
Brill, 2016
With the advent of western modernity towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Chinese scriptworld deconstructed. This was the greatest transformation to take place in this region in all of its recorded history, for that history began in Chinese script. China, Japan, Vietnam, and Korea all used the Chinese script but used it in different ways. The universal system was developed uniquely in each case in interaction with the vernacular. This paper will examine the ways in which Korea adopted and negotiated with the Universal script and how Chinese writing developed with respect to Korean speech. It will conclude with some observations on the tensions brought to bear on the Chinese scriptworld by nationalization and westernization.
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History, Language and Culture in Korea: Proceedings of the 20th Conference of the Association of Korean Studies in Europe (AKSE), 433pp, consists of facsimile copies of papers presented at AKSE's twentieth conference in London (4-8 April, 2001). The texts presented here are in English, Korean and French and include papers in pre-Modern and Modern History, Religion and Thought, Literature and Language, Anthropology and Modern Korea, where these have been supplied in their final form. Additional info http://www.saffronbooksandart.net | Additional materials will also be uploaded here, please revisit or Follow.
HYBRID ORTHOGRAPHIES AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN LITERATURE IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY KOREA
The Routledge Companion to Korean Literature, 2022
This chapter examines the phenomenon of “experimental textuality” in the first decade of the twentieth century, whereby previously separated vernacular (han’gŭl) and cosmopolitan (hancha/hanmun) linguistic elements were combined in novel ways, a process that both foreshadowed and mediated the textual establishment of modern Korean fction and nonfction genres in the next decade. These experimental writing styles were a response by Korean language reformers to the perceived disunity between the spoken and the written language (ŏnmun ich’i 言文二致). They also represented an attempt to bridge the gap between elite and popular readerships and to overcome the “crisis of the vernacular” due to its perceived lack of standardization and legitimacy. These experimental forms of writing ofer an informative backdrop to the subsequent script-based “genrefcation” of Korean writing as “pure” han’gŭl literature on the one hand and mixed-script (kukhanmun) expository writing on the other. This development in Korean writing represented a fundamental reconfguration of the Korean linguistic landscape: the shift from a premodern, cosmopolitan language ideology based on hierarchical compartmentalization of scripts to modern language ideologies inspired by language nationalism that sought a path to increased literacy and eventually established a genre-based separation of scripts.
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