Chejuan language

Jeju (Jeju: , ; ko, 제주어, or , ), often called Jejueo or Jejuan in English-language scholarship, is a Koreanic language traditionally spoken on Jeju Island, South Korea. While often classified as a divergent Jeju dialect ( ko, 제주방언, links=no, ) of the Korean language, the variety is referred to as a language in local government and increasingly in both South Korean and foreign academia. Jeju is not mutually intelligible with the mainland dialects of South Korea.

The consonants of Jeju are similar to those of Seoul Korean, but Jeju has a larger and more conservative vowel inventory. Jeju is a head-final, agglutinative, suffixing language like Korean. Nouns are followed by particles that may function as case markers. Verbs inflect for tense, aspect, mood, evidentiality, relative social status, formality, and other grammatical information. Korean and Jeju differ significantly in their verbal paradigms. For instance, the continuative aspect marker of Jeju and the mood or aspect distinction of many Jeju connective suffixes are absent in Korean. While most of the Jeju lexicon is Koreanic, the language preserves many Middle Korean words now lost in Standard Korean. Jeju may also have a Japonic substratum (see Peninsular Japonic) but this argument has been disputed by Lee (2017).

Jeju was already divergent from Seoul Korean by the fifteenth century, and was unintelligible to mainland Korean visitors by the sixteenth century. The language was severely undermined by the Jeju uprising of 1948, the Korean War, and the modernization of South Korea. All fluent speakers remaining in Jeju Island are now over seventy years old. Most people in Jeju Island now speak a variety of Korean with a Jeju substratum. The language may be somewhat more vigorous in a diaspora community in Osaka, Japan, as many Jeju people migrated to Osaka in 1920s, but even there, younger members of the community speak Japanese. Since 2010, UNESCO has designated the language as critically endangered, the highest level of language endangerment possible. Revitalization efforts are ongoing.

Nomenclature and relationship to Korean

Jeju is closely related to Korean. It was traditionally considered an unusually divergent dialect of Korean, and is still referred to as such by the National Institute of the Korean Language and the South Korean Ministry of Education. While the term "Jeju language" ( ko, 제주어, ) was first used in 1947, it was not until the mid-1990s that the term gained currency in South Korean academia. While "Jeju dialect" was still the preferred usage throughout the decade of the 2000s, the majority of South Korean academic publications had switched to the term "Jeju language" by the early 2010s. Since somewhat earlier, "Jeju language" has also been the term preferred in local law, such as the 2007 Language Act for the Preservation and Promotion of the Jeju Language ( ko, 제주어 보전 및 육성 조례 ), and by non-governmental organizations working to preserve the language. The only English-language monograph on Jeju, published in 2019, consistently refers to it as a language as well. Among native speakers, the term ''Jeju-mal'' "Jeju speech" is most common.

Jeju is not mutually intelligible with even the southernmost dialects of mainland Modern Korean. In a 2014 test for intelligibility, Korean speakers from three different dialect zones (Seoul, Busan, and Yeosu) were exposed to one minute of spoken Jeju, with a control group of native Jeju speakers. On average, Korean native speakers from all three dialect zones answered less than 10% of the basic comprehension questions correctly, while native Jeju speakers answered over 89% of the questions correctly. These results are comparable to the results of an intelligibility test of Norwegian for native Dutch speakers. Diaspora Jeju speakers living in Japan also report that they find it difficult to understand South Korean news media, and resort to Japanese subtitles when watching South Korean TV shows.

Geographic distribution

Jeju was traditionally spoken throughout Jeju Province except in the Chuja Islands, halfway between Jeju Island and mainland Korea, where a variety of Southwestern Korean is found. The language is also used by some of the first- and second-generation members of the Zainichi Korean community in Ikuno-ku, Osaka, Japan.

Compared to mainland Korean dialect groups, there is little internal variation within Jeju. A distinction between a northern and southern dialect with a geographic divide at Hallasan is sometimes posited, but an eastern-western dialectal divide cutting through Jeju City and Seogwipo may better explain the few dialectal differences that do exist. A 2010 survey of regional variation in 305 word sets suggests that the north–south divide and the east–west divide coexist, resulting in four distinct dialect groups.

File:Dialectal diversity in Jeju "lizard".png, An east–west divide is salient in the Jeju words for "lizard".
Eastern Seogwipo uses while western Seogwipo uses .

File:Dialectal diversity in Jeju "crab".png, A north–south divide is more noticeable in the Jeju words for "crab".

History and decline

The Koreanic languages are likely not native to Jeju Island; it has been proposed that the family has its roots in Manchuria, a historical region in northeastern Asia. It is thought that Koreanic speakers migrated from southern Manchuria between the third and eighth centuries CE. Linguist Alexander Vovin suggests that the ancient kingdom of Tamna, which ruled the island until the twelfth century, may have spoken a Japonic language that left a substrate influence on Jeju. When exactly this putative Japonic language may have been replaced by the Koreanic ancestor of Jeju remains unclear.

Unlike mainland Korea, which was ruled only indirectly by the Mongols, Jeju was placed under direct Yuan administration in the late thirteenth century. Significant numbers of Mongol soldiers migrated to the island during this period, and their language acted as a superstratum that may have accelerated local language change. Linguist Yang Changyong speculates that the formation of Jeju as a language independent of Korean was influenced by Mongol. By the fifteenth century, when the invention of Hangul permits a detailed understanding of Korean phonology for the first time, Seoul Korean and Jeju were already divergent; the Seoul prestige dialect of fifteenth-century Middle Korean disallowed the diphthong , but Jeju does not.

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century references to the language of Jeju by mainland Korean literati state that it was already unintelligible to mainland Koreans. Kim Sang-heon (1570―1652), who served as pacification commissioner ( ko, 안무어사 ) on the island from 1601 to 1602, gives six words in the "provincial language" with clear cognates in modern Jeju and also writes:

"The exiled man Shin Jangnyeong was originally a government interpreter. He said, 'The language of this island is most like Chinese, and the sounds they make while driving cattle and horses are yet more impossible to tell apart. Is this because the climate is not far from that of China, or because the Yuan dynasty once ruled and appointed officials here and the Chinese mingled with them?'... What is called the provincial language is but high and thin and cannot be understood."

In 1629, the Korean government banned the emigration of Jeju Islanders to the mainland, further restricting linguistic contacts between Jeju and Korean. At the same time, the island was also used throughout the Joseon era (1392―1910) as a place of exile for disgraced scholar-officials. These highly educated speakers of Seoul Korean often tutored the children of their Jeju neighbors during their exile and established a continuous and significant Seoul Korean superstratum in Jeju.

Jeju remained the dominant language of both private and public spheres under Japanese colonial rule (1910―1945), although many Japanese loanwords entered the lexicon, and many speakers were monolingual. Large-scale migration of Jeju people to Japan began in 1911, and 38,000 Jeju Islanders lived in Osaka alone by 1934. Immigration to Japan continued even after Korean independence into the 1980s. Jeju is still spoken by older members of these diaspora communities, although younger individuals speak Japanese as their native language and are not fluent in Jeju.

Severe disruption to the Jeju language community began after the end of Japanese rule in 1945. Following World War II, Korea was divided between an American-backed government in the South and a Soviet-backed government in the North. Popular opposition to the division of Korea and police brutality led to a rebellion against the American military government on 3 April 1948. The Syngman Rhee regime, which succeeded the American administration in August 1948, suppressed the rebellion with mass killings of civilians. As many as sixty thousand Jeju Islanders, or a full fifth of the pre-rebellion population, were killed. Forty thousand more fled to Japan. Out of the four hundred villages of the island, only 170 remained. The devastating impact of the massacres on the Jeju language community was exacerbated by the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. While Jeju was never occupied by the North Korean army, nearly 150,000 Korean-speaking refugees from the mainland fleeing North Korean invasion arrived in Jeju in the first year of the war. These events shattered the Jeju language's former dominance on the island, and Standard Korean was beginning to displace Jeju in the public sphere by the 1950s.

The decline of Jeju continued into the 1960s and 1970s. The Saemaeul Movement, an ambitious rural modernization program launched by Park Chung-hee, disrupted the traditional village community where Jeju had thrived. The language came to be perceived as an incorrect dialect of Korean, so that students were subject to corporal punishment if they used it in school, and the use of Standard Korean even in the private sphere began to spread from Jeju City outwards. The language attitude of native Jeju speakers in this period was self-disparaging, and even Jeju people regarded the use of Jeju "with contempt." A 1981 survey of language attitudes among high school and university students natively speaking Seoul Korean, Chungcheong Korean, Southwestern Korean, Southeastern Korean, and Jeju showed that Jeju speakers were the most likely among the five groups to ascribe negative traits to their native variety.

A 1992 study of code-switching by native Jeju speakers shows that Jeju was by then in an unfavorable diglossic relationship with Korean, and was largely restricted to informal contexts even between Jeju natives. Within a primarily Jeju-language conversation, speakers might spontaneously switch to Korean to emphasize the rationality or truth value of their statement, while switching to Jeju in a primarily Korean conversation signified that the speaker was making a subjective statement or being less serious.

The same study notes that by 1992, even this variety restricted to the informal domain was usually a Korean dialect with a Jeju substratum, rather than the traditional Jeju language:

"As for the Jeju language [] in general use nowadays [as of 1992], the situation is that its differences from Standard Korean are greatly diminishing compared to the past. Its greatest differences with Standard Korean [now] lie especially in the suffix paradigm, and in other areas the differences are being minimized. The Jeju people accordingly understand that Jeju and Standard Korean are in a form of dialect continuum, and refer to the native language formerly in use as "thick (or intense) Jeju language" and the Jeju language currently in use as "light Jeju language" or "mixed (with Korean) language."

Current status

The official language of South Korea is Standard Korean. Nearly all residents of Jeju Island are bilingual in Standard Korean and Jeju, while many younger individuals are even more fluent in English than in Jeju. Standard Korean is most commonly used in the majority of public areas, while Jeju tends to be reserved for use at home and a few local markets. All schools located on Jeju Island are required to teach Standard Korean and only offer Jeju as an elective course. As a result, there are currently no monolingual speakers of Jeju.

As of 2018, fluent speakers in Jeju Island were all over seventy years of age, while passive competence was found in some people in their forties and fifties. Younger Islanders speak Korean with Jeju substrate influence found in residual elements of the Jeju verbal paradigm and in select vocabulary such as kinship terms. The language is more vigorous in Osaka, where there may be fluent speakers born as late as the 1960s. Since 2010, UNESCO has classified Jeju as a critically endangered language, defined as one whose "youngest speakers are grandparents and older... hospeak the language partially and infrequently."

A 2008 survey of adult residents' knowledge of ninety Jeju cultural words showed that only twenty-one were understood by the majority of those surveyed. Lack of heritage knowledge of Jeju is even more severe among younger people. Four hundred Jeju teenagers were surveyed for their knowledge of 120 basic Jeju vocabulary items in 2010, but only nineteen words were recognized by the majority while forty-five words were understood by less than 10%. A 2018 study suggests that even the verbal paradigm, among the more resilient parts of the substratum, may be in danger; the average middle schooler was more competent in the verb system of English, a language "taught only a few hours a week in school and in private tutoring institutions," than of Jeju.

Revitalization efforts have recently been ongoing. On 27 September 2007, the Jeju provincial government promulgated the Language Act for the Preservation and Promotion of the Jeju Language, which established five-year plans for state-backed language preservation.The Act encouraged public schools on Jeju Island to offer Jeju as an extracurricular activity, as well as to incorporate the language as a part of regular classes if relevant and feasible. In addition, multiple programs were provided for adults, as well. For example, adult language programs are offered every year at the Jeju National University and are all completely free of charge. There are also several local centres on Jeju Island that offer classes in Jeju Language specifically to marriage-based immigrants. However, it was not until UNESCO's 2010 designation of Jeju as critically endangered that the provincial government became proactive in Jeju preservation efforts. In 2016, the provincial government allotted ₩685,000,000 (US$565,592 in 2016) to revitalization programs, and the government-funded Jeju Research Institute has compiled phrasebooks of the language. The provincial Ministry of Education has also published Jeju textbooks for elementary and secondary schools, although some textbooks really teach Standard Korean interspersed with Jeju lexical items. Some public schools offer after-school programs for Jeju, but the short duration of these classes may be insufficient to promote more than "symbolic" use by students. The linguistic competence of many teachers has also been challenged.

On 12 August 2011, the Research Centre for Jeju Studies was opened with the purpose of implementing projects for the revitalization and safeguarding of Jeju Language. The centre has implemented multiple projects and initiatives. The project encouraged the promotion of Jeju Language in schools by tasking the Education Bureau with introducing several revitalization initiatives, including a training program for teachers. The project also started a radio broadcast in Jeju Language, as well as a radio campaign for Jeju slang and an annual Jeju Language festival. An iPhone application was developed, including a glossary, as well as a collection of proverbs, poems, and quizzes in Jeju Language. Finally, an introductory conversation brochure was distributed to both citizens and visitors of Jeju Island in order to encourage the use of the language.

Other preservation and revitalization efforts are led by non-state bodies. The Jeju Language Preservation Society ( ko, 제주어보존회 ), founded in December 2008, publishes ''Deongdeureong-makke'' (), a bimonthly Jeju-language magazine, and holds Jeju teaching programs and speaking contests. Literature in the language has recently been published, including children's books and a 2014 poetry anthology. Local bands and theater troupes have made Jeju-language performances. Regional newspapers such as the ''Jemin Ilbo'' and the ''Halla Ilbo'' include Jeju-language sections, and local branches of KBS and MBC have launched radio programs and a television series in Jeju. Recent South Korean media with nationwide appeal, including the 2010 television series ''Life is Beautiful'' and ''The Great Merchant'', the 2012 drama film ''Jiseul'', and the 2015 television series ''Warm and Cozy'', have also featured spoken Jeju. Outside of Korea, in 2018, the Endangered Languages Archive at SOAS University of London carried out a revitalization project aimed to build a collection of audio and video recordings of Jeju Language being spoken by native speakers. These recordings documented everyday conversations, as well as traditional songs and rituals.

In the past, negative attitudes and opinions towards Jeju were popular amongst Korean citizens. The Standard Korean language places a lot of emphasis on honorifics, as Korean culture is largely centred around being polite to elders. However, Jeju is often viewed to be less polite, due to the use of less honorifics and only four levels of politeness, in comparison to the seven levels in Standard Korean. The younger generation, particularly students, especially believe that Jeju is not respectful enough to use with teachers, whereas Standard Korean is more sophisticated. In addition, Jeju is often associated with the countryside, as the majority of speakers tend to have traditional occupations, including farming, fishing, and diving. As a result, many younger children express a disinterest in learning the language.

However, recent surveys show changes favorable towards Jeju in prevailing language attitudes. In a National Institute of the Korean Language survey in 2005, only 9.4% of Jeju Islanders were very proud of the regional variety. When the same survey was reheld in 2015, 36.8% were very proud of the language, and Jeju Islanders had become the most likely among South Korean dialect groups to have "very positive" opinions of the regional variety. In a 2017 study of 240 Jeju Islanders, 82.8% of those sampled considered Jeju to be "nice to listen to," and 74.9% hoped that their children would learn the language. But significant generational cleavages in language attitudes were also found. For instance, only 13.8% of Jeju Islanders between twenty and forty liked Jeju much more than Standard Korean, which 49.1% of those above eighty did.

In a 2013 survey of Jeju natives, 77.9% agreed with the statement that " he Jeju languagehas to be passed down as part of Jeju culture." But a 2015 study of approximately a thousand Jeju Islanders suggests that even though most Jeju Islanders believe the language to be an important part of the island's culture, the vast majority are skeptical of the language's long-term viability, and more people are unwilling than willing to actively participate in language preservation efforts.

Orthography

Jeju has historically had no written language. Two recently devised standard orthographies are currently in use: a system created in 1991 by scholars of the Jeju Dialect Research Society ( ko, 제주방언연구회 ), and a system promulgated by the provincial government in 2014. Both systems use the Korean alphabet Hangul with one additional letter , which was used in the Middle and Early Modern Korean scripts but is now defunct in written Korean. Similar to the modern Korean script, Jeju orthographies have morphophonemic tendencies, meaning that transcribing the underlying morphology generally takes precedence over the surface form. The two orthographies differ largely because they are based on different morphological analyses of the language, especially of the verbal paradigm, as seen in the example below.

This article will use the government's orthography where the two differ.

The transliteration scheme generally used in Korean linguistics, including when transcribing Jeju, is the Yale Romanization system. Yang C., Yang S., and O'Grady 2019 instead uses a variant of the Revised Romanization system with the addition of the sequence ''aw'' for . This article also uses Revised Romanization with the addition of ''aw'', but without Yang C., Yang S., and O'Grady 2019's one-to-one correspondence between Hangul glyphs and the Latin alphabet.

Phonology

Consonants

The non-approximant consonants of Jeju correspond to the nineteen non-approximant consonants of Standard Korean, and Jeju displays the three-way contrast between stops and affricates characteristic of Modern Korean. Whether the voiced glottal fricative , absent in Standard Korean, exists as a phoneme in Jeju or merely as an allophone of remains disputed. A 2000 acoustic and aerodynamic study of eight native Jeju speakers concludes that "the consonants of the two languages seem to be the same in every respect... the phonetic realization of all ejuconsonants are the same as those found in eoulKorean."

Consonantal phonological processes

Jeju allophony involves a number of phonological processes also found in Seoul Korean. As in Korean, surfaces as intervocally. Also as in Korean, lax stops and affricates have fully voiced allophones in medial position, all obstruents have unreleased allophones in final position, and syllable-final sibilants surface as . Whether non-lax stops and affricates can appear in final position is controversial. The morphological analysis necessary for the government's orthography permits them, while the analysis behind the Jeju Language Research Society's orthography forbids them.

Most non-morphophonological consonant assimilation rules of Standard Korean are also found in Jeju. and are regularly palatalized to before or . Lax obstruents are tensed following another obstruent. aspirates both the preceding and the subsequent lax obstruent. A nasal consonant nasalizes a preceding obstruent or . becomes following all consonants except itself or , and this can itself nasalize the preceding obstruent so that the underlying sequence is realized as . On the other hand, underlying and both produce .

Jeju also has consonant allophones that appear only at morpheme boundaries. Some of these are found in Standard Korean, such as the insertion of before or at most word-internal morpheme boundaries; the palatalization of to before an affixal ; and the tensing of obstruents following certain morpheme-final nasals. Other rules are absent in Standard Korean. For instance, a sonorant-final word or morpheme can trigger aspiration (for older speakers) or tensing (for younger speakers) in a subsequent lax consonant. In some cases this is due to an underlying consonant cluster, but not all cases can be explained in this way. Other Jeju-specific processes include the doubling of a word-final consonant when followed by a vowel, glide, or , and the lenition of to at some word boundaries.

Verbal conjugation can also lead to consonantal changes. Verb stem-final and are lost before . In the case of verb stems ending in , . , and , the final consonants are always preserved in so-called regular verbs, but in irregular verbs, and are lenited to and respectively while and are lost when followed by a vowel.

Underlying consonant clusters

While not permitted in the surface representation of Jeju, morpheme-final consonant clusters can exist in the underlying form. Many cases of post-sonorant aspiration involve morphemes whose Middle Korean cognates feature a final , suggesting that an underlying final after the sonorant should be posited in Jeju as well. Besides these -final clusters, Jeju permits a number of other final consonant clusters, including , , , , and (in the analysis of the government's orthography) . These clusters surface as a single consonant in isolation or before a consonant, but are fully realized when followed by a vowel.

Vowels

Jeju traditionally has a nine-vowel system: the eight vowels of Korean with the addition of ㆍ , a Middle Korean phoneme lost in Seoul in the eighteenth century.

The phonemic identity of is controversial, but native speakers most commonly realize the phoneme as . and are only distinguished in the initial syllable.

Among younger and less fluent speakers, and have both raised to and or respectively, resulting in a seven-vowel system identical to the vowel inventory of Seoul Korean. The raising of Jeju occurred before the raising of , and may have predated Standard Korean's ongoing merger of and . The subsequent loss of may have been motivated by a language-internal desire for symmetry in the vowel system. On the other hand, the vowel mergers are accelerated among Jeju speakers living in coastal communities more exposed to Standard Korean.

Jeju has two or three glides: , , and possibly . can occur with all vowels except and . and have merged even among speakers who distinguish the monophthongs, and many speakers who retain also merge with . cannot occur with the three back vowels or with . occurs only with , and the resulting diphthong is generally realized as word-initially and otherwise.

Glide-vowel sequences may be analyzed as diphthongs, with the phonemic identities of , , and being , , and respectively.

Vowel phonological processes

Several phonological processes affect the surface realization of Jeju vowels. In one process shared with Standard Korean, a bisyllabic vowel sequence may be contracted to a monosyllabic polyphthong.

Vowel-affecting processes are particularly numerous in the verbal paradigm. Verb stem-final is lost before a vowel-initial suffix. Similar to Standard Korean, a stem-final diphthongizes a subsequent vowel by inserting the onglide

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