Pulgasari & propaganda: studying Korean with North Korean content
If you have any familiarity with the various questionable activities the North Korean government has been involved in over the decades, you might have heard about the country’s penchant for kidnapping foreign citizens — including a South Korean movie director, Shin Sang-ok.
I’d heard about North Korea’s abduction of a director before too, but until recently I had no idea what sort of films he actually made. I found out about his last, biggest film a month ago while randomly browsing the internet, and I’ve got to say it’s not quite what I expected:
Pulgasari (Korean: 불가사리) is a 1985 North Korean dark fantasy-action kaiju film directed by Shin Sang-ok and Chong Gon Jo. — Wikipedia
To sum up the story in one sentence, the movie is about a metal-eating Godzilla-like monster that takes part in a peasant rebellion during Korea’s Koryŏ/고려/高麗 dynasty. Pretty wild stuff.
The name of the titular monster, Pulgasari, seems to come from Sino-Korean 不可殺, or “unkillable” (in Mandarin: bùkěshā). It’s also the Korean word for “starfish”, which I guess sort of makes sense based on starfish’s ability to grow back severed limbs.
(A year after this movie was made, Shin and his wife escaped while at a film festival in Vienna.)
I also discovered that the entire movie is available to watch for free on Youtube with English subtitles, and this weekend I finally got around to watching it.
Although the circumstances in which it was made are morally dubious, the movie itself is reasonably entertaining, featuring a well-paced plot with a couple of narrative ups and downs, a few humorous moments (maybe not all intentional), as well an ending that could be interpreted as a subtle jab at the Kim Il-Sung regime (the title image of this post is taken from the last ten minutes of the film).
Linguistically, the movie was interesting for me not only because everyone spoke with a North Korean accent, but also with historical-drama grammatical features (different verb endings etc.).
Pulgasari was the first North Korean movie I’ve ever watched, but it’s hardly the first piece of North Korean media I’ve consumed. An interest in whatever-the-hell-is-going-on-with-North-Korea (and Korean history more generally, and Cold War history and East Asian political history) has been a significant factor in my interest in studying Korean since the beginning, so reading and watching stuff from the North has been a piece (but not huge—at most 10%) of my Korean language media consumption for a while now, to add a bit of variety between the K-dramas, music, and news.
Maybe I just have a thing for politically divided languages. I spent a lot of time working on Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian/etc. around 2012–2013, and for several years after that Hindi/Urdu was one of my top language-learning priorities.
Of course, no one currently considers North and South Korean to be two different languages (so maybe a better comparison would be something like the situation of Bengali). As you’d imagine, many of the differences between North and South Korean are the result of 70 years of political separation — although some differences also reflect pre-partition dialect differences between Pyongyang and Seoul. These are the most notable ones:
- In the Pyeongyang accent, there tends to be confusion of the ㅗ/o andㅓ/eo sounds — in contrast with the Seoul accent, where people often confuse ㅐ/ae andㅔ/e instead.
- Another Pyeongyang accent feature is a tendency to pronounce ㅈ as “ts” instead “ch”. (e.g. the North Korean word for Korea, 조선/朝鮮/Chosŏn, ends up sounding more like “Tsŏsŏn” because these two features.)
- The Pyeongyang accent also has a distinct intonation pattern. I’m not sure about the technical details, but I can recognize it when I hear it.
- The Pyeongan Province/평안도/平安道 dialect around Pyeongyang is also noted for its lack of palatalization that most other Korean varieties have gone through. A classic example is 정거장/停車場/chŏnggŏjang (“parking lot”), which comes out as 덩거당/tŏnggŏdang instead. As far as I’m aware, this feature hasn’t made it into formal speech.
- Sino-Korean words beginning with r/ㄹ are preserved in the North, while in the South the ㄹ either gets dropped or turned into an n/ㄴ. So in the North “history” (歷史) is 력사/ryŏksa instead of 역사/yŏksa, and “labor” (勞動) is 로동/rodong instead of 노동/nodong.
- There are various other differences in spelling, e.g. North Korean tends to use fewer spaces between words. The letters of the alphabet also have different names and are ordered differently.
- In terms of handling of foreign place names, North Korean has a tendency to use the original source language while South Korean uses English loans. e.g. Sweden is 스웨리예/Sŭweriye (from Sverige) instead of 스웨덴/Sŭweden, and Spain is 에스빠냐 /Esŭppanya instead of 스페인/Sŭp’ein. (Interestingly, the BBC World Service’s daily Korean broadcast uses North Korean vocabulary like this — although the presenters speak in a South Korean accent.)
- For modern Chinese names in particular, North Korean uses Sino-Korean pronunciation while South Korean phonetically transcribes the Mandarin pronunciation. For example, Xi Jinping/習近平 is 습근평/Sŭpkŭnp’yŏng in the North but 시진핑/Sijinp’ing in the South. (Compare Japanese Shūkinpei and Vietnamese Tập Cận Bình, which use Sino-Japanese and Sino-Vietnamese.)
Apart from the Pyeongyang-based standard (a.k.a. Munhwaŏ/문화어/文化語, literally “culture language”), there are other interesting dialects in the North as well. In particular, the dialect of Hamgyŏng Province/咸鏡道 in the far North is also the historical mother tongue of the Koryo-saram, Koreans in the Soviet Union who were deported to Central Asia in the 1930s. (You can read more about the Koryo-mar dialect here.) The language of ethnic Koreans in China (Chosŏnjok/朝鮮族) is also mainly related to Northern dialects.
The first time I heard the obscure English word “dotard” was in news about North Korea — it means “an old person in a state of mental decline” and was a term Pyeongyang sometimes used to refer to Donald Trump in official statements.
I decided to try and figure what the original Korean term was for “dotard”, which led me to discover the bizarre world of North Korean websites. I ended up finding this statement and its translation on www.uriminzokkiri.com (“Uri minzok kkiri” means “among our nation”):
이렇듯 경솔하고 잘망스러운 늙은이여서 또다시 《망녕든 늙다리》로 부르지 않으면 안될 시기가 다시 올수도 있을것 같다.
As he is such a heedless and erratic old man, the time when we can not but call him a “dotard” again may come.
(A link I saved for the full statement appears to be dead. But I had this snippet saved in the form of a Facebook post from last year.)
Apart from government statements, I also came across Youtube channels updated daily with television broadcasts from North Korea. A channel I used to follow got taken down a while ago, but I later came across another one via the website of the Chongryon/총련/總聯, a Japan-based organization representing ethnic Koreans who politically identify with the North (in the early post-war years it was the larger of the two Japanese Korean organizations —the other being the South-affiliated Mindan—but it’s understandably been on the decline lately):
For a country that puts lots of emphasis on propaganda and projecting a certain image of itself, there’s also unsurprisingly a lot of North Korean websites with freely accessible “educational material,” like magazines in PDF format and recordings of Kim Il-sung’s memoirs with subtitles in various languages (Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Russian).
And then there are the leaks. In 2018, a group of security researchers got their hands on a stash of files dumped from a North Korean CD-ROM, and made it all available on the internet. The documents includes textbooks for subjects ranging from history and literature to mechanical engineering and hacking, as well as… Chinese characters. I actually ended up reading a good amount of the Chinese character textbook, which provides a rare example of mixed-script Korean in the modern day — plus a strong dose of Juche ideology. 😅
Finally, I suppose South Korean depictions of North Korea also deserve an honorable mention here. There’s the hugely popular drama Crash Landing on You, as well as movies like Steel Rain, Ashfall, and The Spy Gone North, which all feature characters speaking with North Korean accents to varying degrees.
There are also lots and lots of videos on Youtube featuring defectors from North Korea, like this:
Besides North Korean stuff, my efforts to study Korean over the past year and a half have also included dabbling in Middle Korean (like reading the Nogeoldae, a medieval Korean-Mandarin phrasebook) and other dialects like those of Busan and Jeju. (e.g. the 2012 South Korean gangster film Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time provides a great example of Busan dialect, including grammatical features that don’t exist in standard Korean like different endings for yes-no questions vs. wh-questions.)
In general, I’ve found that approaching a language from as many different angles as possible is key to staying motivated, which might also explain how I stuck with Serbo-Croatian and Hindustani for so long, or how I’ve been able to get more interested in Italian this time around thanks to studying its “dialects” too. Comparing the language you’re learning to dialects, variants, and closely related languages also seems like a great way to get a better feel for how a language “works”, in my experience.
