Reading this article, I found myself agreeing with more of it than I expected, even as a Korean-language speaker.
There are words that are used differently in North Korea and South Korea, but even within South Korean Korean, the sentence endings, vocabulary, and phrasing you should use can change a lot depending on the situation. The basic structure may be similar, but small differences matter.
Vocabulary changes depending on context, relationship, social distance, age, and whether the situation is public or private. North Korean speech is often more direct, but in South Korea, especially in more formal or higher-status social settings, speaking that directly can make a person sound crude or unsophisticated. Formal South Korean speech is often based on cushioning expressions. So even with the same Korean writing system, the rules for using sentences differ slightly.
This is something I feel even more strongly as a non-Western speaker participating on HN. If I do not use AI translation, many of my expressions become awkward. But after asking about it, I understand that even if the original Korean text was written without AI, using AI translation alone may cause the English version to be treated as Gen AI, which means I cannot really submit my blog posts.
So, reluctantly, I write my English comments by carefully combining machine translation, the English I have learned, and manual correction. Reading this article made me worry about how low-quality or awkward my comments may appear on HN.
Your comments are great and I trust it more precisely because you didn't use AI ,and trust me, we can tell when one uses AI, as the sentence and grammar structures are way different.
It doesn't make a convincing case to me. The differences cited seem no more, perhaps less than the differences between Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish which are, at least officially, distinct languages not dialects but are nonetheless largely mutually intelligible for many native speakers.
And I'll bet that "Modern slang expressions — enthusiastically adopted by younger generations" is also difficult for elderly South Koreans; just as teenage British slang is foreign to this seventy year old Briton.
I suspect that a kind of class distinction and lack of shared recent history is behind most of the difficulty in socialisation rather then the language itself.
Exposure is also a path to more mutual intelligibility, even if the differences persist. You're more likely to understand a dialect that isn't yours if you've heard it before, or even better, heard it often. So while I don't know much about Korea, I suspect more contact between north and south would also bridge the gaps.
As a Korean learner I think the article makes one believe it's the different meanings of words that cause problems, when it's more the fundamental difference in how the language is spoken in every day situations.
E.g. see the other comment by the Korean speaker here:
> Vocabulary changes depending on context, relationship, social distance, age, and whether the situation is public or private. North Korean speech is often more direct [...].
Yeah, but I will point out that Sweden, Norway, and Denmark are also countries with incredibly similar political cultures, economic systems, societal norms, cultural values, and so on. I wouldn’t be surprised if the culture shock between DPRK and SK is much bigger after 70 years of tyranny and oppression.
Sweden and Denmark fought for centuries. Sometimes over Norway, sometimes over other areas, mostly over petty squabbles.
This is not a thing that affect current relations between the countries in any way, and hasn’t since Norway’s (deserved) independence. Don’t make the mistake of confusing sibling banter with international relations.
Imo as a Korean speaker, the thing about North Korean Korean is that it sounds much more aggressive, from the words to the general tone. They’re also usually much more direct, and in a lot of North Korean defector stories I’ve read, that has been a common pain point for them.
Is that something new (divergence since the political split), or an older regional dialect thing that is now more obvious due to the political situation?
> Unlike North Korea, South Korean society extensively uses loanwords in technology, finance, and culture. English-derived words like “computer,” “café,” and “internet” are ubiquitous in the South but virtually unknown in the North, creating challenges for defectors encountering them for the first time.
This is tangential to the topic at hand, but as a Korean learner of ~9 years, it's maddening just how many English loanwords there are. In addition to pure Korean words, there's a surfeit of Sino-Korean (Chinese-derived), or Hanja words. Both of these are beautiful, and then the English loanwords stick out like a sore thumb.
It's trendy to do so, but I think displacing Korean/Sino-Korean vocabulary at this pace is reckless. I think of it as 사대주의 (toadyism) to some degree as well.
---
Some years ago, I went to some cafe and ordered a coffee, like I've done thousands of times here. The employee asked me if I wanted a '디씨' (di-ssi). I had no idea what that was, so I had to ask, and lo and behold: it was shorthand for discount. Discount would be 5 syllables in Korean (디스카운트), an unbelievably long word in a language where most words are 2 syllables.
I was, and am, baffled because Korean already has a serviceable and widely used word that means discount: 할인 (hal-een), which is Sino-Korean (Hanja: 割引). I figure this is some marketing thing, but the same point applies. There are many cases where there's a perfectly capable word that, for seemingly no reason, gets switched out for an English loanword.
Maybe it's to give headaches to anyone trying to learn the language.
This is an extreme level of pedantry(forgive me), but there is a subtle difference between "DC" and "할인" (and also "세일").
"할인" refers to a wide variety of discounts: it may have a few conditions (minimum quantity, membership, etc.), be available only for a certain period of time, or be a fixed amount or percentage.
"세일" is pretty much the same, although it puts a tiny bit more focus on being a limited-time offer and being percentage-based.
"DC" almost always refers only to a simple, percentage-based discount or rounding down the price. It also sounds much more spontaneous and less formal.
FWIW, North Koreans also use lots of English-derived loanwords for computer topics, but they may be different from those in the south. Some time ago I made a search interface for a North Korean English dictionary if you want to poke around: https://yorwba.github.io/dic.html/ For example, "file" is 화일 (hwail) instead of 파일 (pail).
I completely understand the sentiment you're expressing here, however if it helps the language you see as a monolithic invader underwent exactly the same process, more than once. If you could go back in time, no doubt a 12th-century Anglo-Saxon would bemoan the influx of Norman French replacing perfectly capable English (Germanic) words.
This is the same sort of thing as is happening in other languages such as Polish. Many English loan-words are being used when there exist equivalent Polish words, even on the news broadcast on TV.
I'm baffled that "cel podróży" was replaced with a bizarre "destynacja" from English 'destination'. And it seems it's also being used outside tourism context.
Not mention the infamous "hejter" but so far I don't think there's any good Polish equivalent and people are fine with that loanword - especially politicians.
It happens all the time in English too, not always super broadly though now that English is the lingua franca (and that is a foreign phrase that's aged poorly but has no proper translation!). It's very common to prefer romanized genre names (eg danmei, isekai, xianxia, wuxia) rather than the English equivalents/translations/reverse borrowings.
> In addition to pure Korean words, there's a surfeit of Sino-Korean (Chinese-derived), or Hanja words. Both of these are beautiful, and then the English loanwords stick out like a sore thumb.
Any chance the English loanwords stick out to you and the Chinese ones don't because you can recognize English words but not Chinese words?
I can recognize many Sino-Korean words and zero Korean words, so I tend to think of the Sino-Korean words as sticking out.
The Sino-Korean words stand out, but in a beautiful sense to my ears/eyes. It helps that they're generally short at 2 syllables and are represented nicely with the Hangeul script. Given that they make up about 57% of the Korean language [0], they're unavoidable.
English/German loanwords just stick out due to there being fewer of them, and they look atrocious in Hangeul, like little dirt islands in a sea of pure Korean and Sino-Korean words.
Since I study Hanja I imagine Sino-Korean words stick out a bit more for me, but I think anyone who's studied Korean for a while can get a sense of the two major groups. They just sound very different.
I would have loved to read the version of the article that dove deeper and was not touched by LLM, even if it meant less clear English from the (presumably Korean) author.
It’s not just “touched by the LLM” — it’s literally transformed. /s
I have the same feeling, I skipped reading any paragraph that starts with “not X, Y”.
It’s possible the author has so little proficiency in English that without LLMs they would be hardly intelligible. Unfortunately I developed an allergic reaction to LLM-generated texts…
The article is full of interesting examples of linguistics differences between NK and SK, but…
As someone with a degree in linguistics, I question whether the author of this article has a sufficient grasp on the subject to put it in proper context.
One of the clearest indications of a superficial understanding of the subject matter is in the section describing "words with different meaning but the same spelling" or "homophones." The examples given are word pairs like "service" and "volunteers," which are obviously related in meaning; these are what linguists would immediately identify as examples of semantic shift (or perhaps polysemy), not of homophony.
Basically every language with more than a few thousand speakers in close proximity has internal dialectical differences. Americans and Brits experience linguistic difficulties similar to what's described in the article ("nappy"…?) when newly-exposed to each others' English. Having lived in various parts of the US and Canada, I know that the same thing happens even among people without easily distinguishable accents.
Judgments and assumptions about other subgroups’ use of language is also pretty universal. Stereotypical Southern accents are often perceived as uneducated in the northeast and west of the US; Québec French is perceived as degraded by the influence of English in France, although in some ways it's extremely conservative (in the linguistic sense) and retains words and other features of 18th-century French.
Anyway, this is all to say that the article is interesting, but the linguistic barriers it describes are unsurprising and not in any way unique to Korea. Without a more informed take on the subject, I'm skeptical that language differences are such a huge barrier to integration of North Koreans into SK society, any more than a British or Australian is Nigerian accent is a barrier to integration into (say) Seattle or Vancouver.
Eh, Spanish has the same issues across the pond and everyone adapts quickly.
Móvil/Celular -cell phone-
Camarero/Mesero -waiter-
Tiroteo/Balacera -shooting-
Nevera/Heladera -freezer-
Cacahuete/Maní -peanut-
Coche/Carro -car- (In Iberian Spanish carro it's a old carriage)
Ordenador/Computadora (Computador was used in Ib. Spa. long ago maybe in 1960's and 1970's). And -computación (computing) it's used on formal, academical contexts, such as papers for the university.
Of course a formally written book will be understood everywhere, and the older, the better.
A few years back I analyzed how (informal, social media) written Spanish differs from place to place and (re-)discovered that the vireynados were a thing a while back :)
Reading this article, I found myself agreeing with more of it than I expected, even as a Korean-language speaker.
There are words that are used differently in North Korea and South Korea, but even within South Korean Korean, the sentence endings, vocabulary, and phrasing you should use can change a lot depending on the situation. The basic structure may be similar, but small differences matter.
Vocabulary changes depending on context, relationship, social distance, age, and whether the situation is public or private. North Korean speech is often more direct, but in South Korea, especially in more formal or higher-status social settings, speaking that directly can make a person sound crude or unsophisticated. Formal South Korean speech is often based on cushioning expressions. So even with the same Korean writing system, the rules for using sentences differ slightly.
This is something I feel even more strongly as a non-Western speaker participating on HN. If I do not use AI translation, many of my expressions become awkward. But after asking about it, I understand that even if the original Korean text was written without AI, using AI translation alone may cause the English version to be treated as Gen AI, which means I cannot really submit my blog posts.
So, reluctantly, I write my English comments by carefully combining machine translation, the English I have learned, and manual correction. Reading this article made me worry about how low-quality or awkward my comments may appear on HN.
Counter signalling is a powerful thing; I think your comment will be appreciated because it is clearly written by a human
thanks!
Machine translations are so easy to spot for exactly the same reasons you point out.
Machine English is generally much more off-putting than English with a few mistakes, so I don’t think you need to be so nervous.
Your comments are great and I trust it more precisely because you didn't use AI ,and trust me, we can tell when one uses AI, as the sentence and grammar structures are way different.
My first language is Chinese. I found that even the order of sentence leaks information, too.
You can prompt an LLM to sound human but apparently it takes some effort.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46393992#46396486
It doesn't make a convincing case to me. The differences cited seem no more, perhaps less than the differences between Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish which are, at least officially, distinct languages not dialects but are nonetheless largely mutually intelligible for many native speakers.
And I'll bet that "Modern slang expressions — enthusiastically adopted by younger generations" is also difficult for elderly South Koreans; just as teenage British slang is foreign to this seventy year old Briton.
I suspect that a kind of class distinction and lack of shared recent history is behind most of the difficulty in socialisation rather then the language itself.
Exposure is also a path to more mutual intelligibility, even if the differences persist. You're more likely to understand a dialect that isn't yours if you've heard it before, or even better, heard it often. So while I don't know much about Korea, I suspect more contact between north and south would also bridge the gaps.
As a Korean learner I think the article makes one believe it's the different meanings of words that cause problems, when it's more the fundamental difference in how the language is spoken in every day situations.
E.g. see the other comment by the Korean speaker here:
> Vocabulary changes depending on context, relationship, social distance, age, and whether the situation is public or private. North Korean speech is often more direct [...].
Also Korean slang changes incredibly fast.
As a wise man once said, the difference between a dialect and a language is that a language has an army and an navy
Yeah, but I will point out that Sweden, Norway, and Denmark are also countries with incredibly similar political cultures, economic systems, societal norms, cultural values, and so on. I wouldn’t be surprised if the culture shock between DPRK and SK is much bigger after 70 years of tyranny and oppression.
Those Scandinavian countries fought with eachother for centuries.
I find it really weird when Danish suddenly pretend Norwegians are their long lost brothers.
Sweden and Denmark fought for centuries. Sometimes over Norway, sometimes over other areas, mostly over petty squabbles.
This is not a thing that affect current relations between the countries in any way, and hasn’t since Norway’s (deserved) independence. Don’t make the mistake of confusing sibling banter with international relations.
Imo as a Korean speaker, the thing about North Korean Korean is that it sounds much more aggressive, from the words to the general tone. They’re also usually much more direct, and in a lot of North Korean defector stories I’ve read, that has been a common pain point for them.
Is that something new (divergence since the political split), or an older regional dialect thing that is now more obvious due to the political situation?
Communist governments often prefer to use expressions that are more down-to-earth and colloquial, due to their populist root.
It could be related to that, or just a matter of North-South dialectal differences I guess.
> Unlike North Korea, South Korean society extensively uses loanwords in technology, finance, and culture. English-derived words like “computer,” “café,” and “internet” are ubiquitous in the South but virtually unknown in the North, creating challenges for defectors encountering them for the first time.
This is tangential to the topic at hand, but as a Korean learner of ~9 years, it's maddening just how many English loanwords there are. In addition to pure Korean words, there's a surfeit of Sino-Korean (Chinese-derived), or Hanja words. Both of these are beautiful, and then the English loanwords stick out like a sore thumb.
It's trendy to do so, but I think displacing Korean/Sino-Korean vocabulary at this pace is reckless. I think of it as 사대주의 (toadyism) to some degree as well.
---
Some years ago, I went to some cafe and ordered a coffee, like I've done thousands of times here. The employee asked me if I wanted a '디씨' (di-ssi). I had no idea what that was, so I had to ask, and lo and behold: it was shorthand for discount. Discount would be 5 syllables in Korean (디스카운트), an unbelievably long word in a language where most words are 2 syllables.
I was, and am, baffled because Korean already has a serviceable and widely used word that means discount: 할인 (hal-een), which is Sino-Korean (Hanja: 割引). I figure this is some marketing thing, but the same point applies. There are many cases where there's a perfectly capable word that, for seemingly no reason, gets switched out for an English loanword.
Maybe it's to give headaches to anyone trying to learn the language.
This is an extreme level of pedantry(forgive me), but there is a subtle difference between "DC" and "할인" (and also "세일").
"할인" refers to a wide variety of discounts: it may have a few conditions (minimum quantity, membership, etc.), be available only for a certain period of time, or be a fixed amount or percentage.
"세일" is pretty much the same, although it puts a tiny bit more focus on being a limited-time offer and being percentage-based.
"DC" almost always refers only to a simple, percentage-based discount or rounding down the price. It also sounds much more spontaneous and less formal.
No need for forgiveness, I appreciate the pedantry and explanations. Personal grips aside, I'm forever a student of the language.
FWIW, North Koreans also use lots of English-derived loanwords for computer topics, but they may be different from those in the south. Some time ago I made a search interface for a North Korean English dictionary if you want to poke around: https://yorwba.github.io/dic.html/ For example, "file" is 화일 (hwail) instead of 파일 (pail).
This is really interesting, thanks for putting it together. I figure for specific topics like computing it's pretty much unavoidable.
You might also be interested in the writeup by the person who reverse-engineered the original dictionary file format: https://digitalnk.com/blog/2020/05/08/porting-north-korean-d...
I completely understand the sentiment you're expressing here, however if it helps the language you see as a monolithic invader underwent exactly the same process, more than once. If you could go back in time, no doubt a 12th-century Anglo-Saxon would bemoan the influx of Norman French replacing perfectly capable English (Germanic) words.
To be pedantic, not German, rather words of Germanic origin (or just native Old English words)
It's ironic no doubt to be complaining about this topic, in English. I can empathize with that 12th-century Anglo-Saxon.
This is the same sort of thing as is happening in other languages such as Polish. Many English loan-words are being used when there exist equivalent Polish words, even on the news broadcast on TV.
I'm baffled that "cel podróży" was replaced with a bizarre "destynacja" from English 'destination'. And it seems it's also being used outside tourism context.
Not mention the infamous "hejter" but so far I don't think there's any good Polish equivalent and people are fine with that loanword - especially politicians.
It happens all the time in English too, not always super broadly though now that English is the lingua franca (and that is a foreign phrase that's aged poorly but has no proper translation!). It's very common to prefer romanized genre names (eg danmei, isekai, xianxia, wuxia) rather than the English equivalents/translations/reverse borrowings.
> In addition to pure Korean words, there's a surfeit of Sino-Korean (Chinese-derived), or Hanja words. Both of these are beautiful, and then the English loanwords stick out like a sore thumb.
Any chance the English loanwords stick out to you and the Chinese ones don't because you can recognize English words but not Chinese words?
I can recognize many Sino-Korean words and zero Korean words, so I tend to think of the Sino-Korean words as sticking out.
The Sino-Korean words stand out, but in a beautiful sense to my ears/eyes. It helps that they're generally short at 2 syllables and are represented nicely with the Hangeul script. Given that they make up about 57% of the Korean language [0], they're unavoidable.
English/German loanwords just stick out due to there being fewer of them, and they look atrocious in Hangeul, like little dirt islands in a sea of pure Korean and Sino-Korean words.
Since I study Hanja I imagine Sino-Korean words stick out a bit more for me, but I think anyone who's studied Korean for a while can get a sense of the two major groups. They just sound very different.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Korean_vocabulary
I would have loved to read the version of the article that dove deeper and was not touched by LLM, even if it meant less clear English from the (presumably Korean) author.
It’s not just “touched by the LLM” — it’s literally transformed. /s
I have the same feeling, I skipped reading any paragraph that starts with “not X, Y”.
It’s possible the author has so little proficiency in English that without LLMs they would be hardly intelligible. Unfortunately I developed an allergic reaction to LLM-generated texts…
The article is full of interesting examples of linguistics differences between NK and SK, but…
As someone with a degree in linguistics, I question whether the author of this article has a sufficient grasp on the subject to put it in proper context.
One of the clearest indications of a superficial understanding of the subject matter is in the section describing "words with different meaning but the same spelling" or "homophones." The examples given are word pairs like "service" and "volunteers," which are obviously related in meaning; these are what linguists would immediately identify as examples of semantic shift (or perhaps polysemy), not of homophony.
Basically every language with more than a few thousand speakers in close proximity has internal dialectical differences. Americans and Brits experience linguistic difficulties similar to what's described in the article ("nappy"…?) when newly-exposed to each others' English. Having lived in various parts of the US and Canada, I know that the same thing happens even among people without easily distinguishable accents.
Judgments and assumptions about other subgroups’ use of language is also pretty universal. Stereotypical Southern accents are often perceived as uneducated in the northeast and west of the US; Québec French is perceived as degraded by the influence of English in France, although in some ways it's extremely conservative (in the linguistic sense) and retains words and other features of 18th-century French.
Anyway, this is all to say that the article is interesting, but the linguistic barriers it describes are unsurprising and not in any way unique to Korea. Without a more informed take on the subject, I'm skeptical that language differences are such a huge barrier to integration of North Koreans into SK society, any more than a British or Australian is Nigerian accent is a barrier to integration into (say) Seattle or Vancouver.
Eh, Spanish has the same issues across the pond and everyone adapts quickly.
Móvil/Celular -cell phone-
Camarero/Mesero -waiter-
Tiroteo/Balacera -shooting-
Nevera/Heladera -freezer-
Cacahuete/Maní -peanut-
Coche/Carro -car- (In Iberian Spanish carro it's a old carriage)
Ordenador/Computadora (Computador was used in Ib. Spa. long ago maybe in 1960's and 1970's). And -computación (computing) it's used on formal, academical contexts, such as papers for the university.
Of course a formally written book will be understood everywhere, and the older, the better.
Sure, US vs. UK English has this as well, in things like "fanny", "boot", "chip", etc.
But a key difference here is that NK and SK are separated by a fence, not by 2,000 miles of ocean.
British English is quickly becoming Americanized… (at least according to my results a few years back https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.00781v1)
Most "Americanized" variations came from Britain itself, including those that come more directly from greek, or skipped French influence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_s...
You forgot the best one:
"Coger" in Spain means "to grab", in LATAM it means "to have sex" xD
Similarly, I’ve been told that “te quiero mucho” can mean very different things depending on where you are
A few years back I analyzed how (informal, social media) written Spanish differs from place to place and (re-)discovered that the vireynados were a thing a while back :)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
> Móvil/Celular -cell phone-
Can't tell if something has changed after 20 years when I was last time watching satellite tv, but German used to call phone "handy"
There is lots of exposure to these differences: songs, books, TV, Internet posts, etc. that isn't necessarily there for North Korean.
those girls on the youtube videos seem to be managing?
“Onion on sale”