Oral-Written Hybridization of Spoken Korean in the Chosŏn School Community: A Sociolinguistic Study of the Use of Written-Style Expressions

Abstract

This study examines the use of written-style expressions in spoken discourse within the Chosŏn School community in Japan, with the aim of understanding why spoken Zainichi Korean may sound “unnatural” or “awkward” to Korean speakers in South Korea. Linguistic data were collected from eight documentary films featuring Chosŏn (Korean) schools in Japan and seven classroom conversations recorded at Chosŏn middle and high schools, and were compared with the Korean Sejong Corpus. The results suggest a consistent linguistic tendency for the community’s spoken discourse to favor expressions typically associated with written Korean across five grammatical categories.