The Northeast Dialect, sometimes called the Hamgyong Dialect (), is a dialect of the Korean language used in most of North and South Hamgyà Âng and Ryanggang provinces of northeastern North Korea, all of which were originally united as Hamgyà Âng Province. Since the nineteenth century, it has also been spoken by Korean diaspora communities in Northeast China and the former Soviet Union.
Characteristic features of Hamgyà Âng include a pitch accent closely aligned to Middle Korean tone, extensive palatalization, widespread umlaut, preservation of pre-Middle Korean intervocalic consonants, distinctive verbal suffixes, and an unusual syntactic rule in which negative particles intervene between the auxiliary and the main verb.
The Hamgyà Âng dialect is the Korean variety spoken in northeastern Hamgyà Âng Province, now further divided as the North Korean provinces of North Hamgyà Âng, South Hamgyà Âng, and Ryanggang. However, not all of Hamgyà Âng speaks the dialect. The Korean variety spoken south of a bend of the Tumen River, on Korea's border with China and Russia, is classified as a separate Yukjin dialect which is significantly more conservative than the mainstream Hamgyà Âng dialect. The far southern counties of Kà Âmya and Kowà Ân, while within South Hamgyà Âng's administrative jurisdiction, speak a dialect which is usually not classified as Hamgyà Âng because it lacks a pitch accent.
The dialect is now spoken outside of Korea, in both China and Central Asia. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in response to poor harvests and the Japanese annexation of Korea, many Koreans, including Hamgyà Âng speakers, emigrated from the northern parts of the peninsula to eastern Manchuria (now Northeast China) and the southern part of Primorsky Krai in the Russian Far East. The descendants of these immigrants to Manchuria continue to speak, read, and write varieties of Korean while living in China, where they enjoy regional autonomy. In the 1930s, Stalin had the entire Korean population of the Russian Far East, some 250,000 people, forcibly deported to Soviet Central Asia, particularly Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. There are small Korean communities scattered throughout central Asia maintaining forms of Korean known collectively as Koryo-mar, but their language is under severe pressure from local languages and Standard Seoul Korean and has been expected to go extinct within the early 21st century.
The most conservative forms of Hamgyà Âng dialect are currently found in Central Asian communities, because the Korean language's lack of vitality there has put an end to natural language change. Among the communities where Hamgyà Âng remains widely spoken, the Chinese diaspora dialect is more conservative than the modern North Korean dialect, as the latter has been under extensive pressure from the state-enforced North Korean standard language since the 1960s.
The first dictionary of Korean in a European language, 's attempt at a RussianâÂÂKorean dictionary, was based largely on the Hamgyà Âng dialect; the author lived in Vladivostok while composing it.
Like the southeastern Gyeongsang dialect but unlike other Korean dialects, the Hamgyà Âng dialect has a distinct high-low pitch accent system used to distinguish what would otherwise be homophones. Pitch-accent minimal pairs do not have tone in isolation, but only in the presence of a particle or copula. For instance, the word âÂÂhomophonous in the toneless standard Korean dialect of SeoulâÂÂmay mean both "pear" and "belly" in Hamgyà Âng as well, so long as the word exists in isolation. But when attached to the topic marker , is realized as with a high pitch on the second syllable, while is realized as with high pitch on the first syllable. Unlike Gyeongsang pitches, Hamgyà Âng pitches are regular reflexes of fifteenth-century Middle Korean tones. The Middle Korean high and rising tones have become the Hamgyà Âng high pitch, and the Middle Korean low tone has become the Hamgyà Âng low pitch. Vowel length is not phonemic.
The Hamgyà Âng dialect has palatalized both Middle Korean , and , into , like the majority of Korean dialects, but unlike Seoul Korean, which has palatalized only the former pair.
Middle Korean had voiced fricatives , , and , which have disappeared in most modern dialects, but not in Gyeongsang and other southern provinces. Evidence from internal reconstruction suggests that these consonants arose from lenition of , , and in voiced environments. Again like Gyeongsang, Hamgyà Âng often retains , , and in these words.
In the Hamgyà Âng dialect, the "t-irregular verbs", which are Middle Korean verb stems that end in before a consonant-initial suffix and in before a vowel-initial one, are regularly realized as even before a vowel. However, unlike verb stems that always ended in even in Middle Korean, the formerly t-irregular verbs cause reinforcement of the following consonant. This is again identical to the reflexes of t-irregularity in the Gyeongsang dialect.
The Hamgyà Âng dialect traditionally had ten vowels, corresponding to the ten vowels of very conservative Seoul Korean speakers. However, and have now diphthongized into and , as in Seoul, and there is an ongoing merger of and , now almost complete, and increasingly also of and . The end result is expected to be a much-reduced six-vowel inventory. The merger of and and and is a newly emergent areal feature in North Korean dialects since the mid-twentieth century, also shared by the modern Pyongan dialect. Many instances of /o/ in Standard Korean, especially in grammatical constructions, are /u~ï/ in Hamgyà Âng. For instance, the Seoul conjunction "and" is realized as .
There is a productive system of umlaut in the Hamgyà Âng dialect. , , , , and are fronted to , , , , and , respectively, when followed by a sequence of a non-coronal consonant and a front and close vowel or glide, such as . In some cases, this has become lexicalized; compare Hamgyà Âng "meat" to Seoul "id." Umlaut is also common in Gyeongsang.
In native vocabulary, Middle Korean CjV sequences have monophthongized: Middle Korean > Hamgyà Âng . In Sino-Korean vocabulary, CjV sequences have merged into umlauted monophthongs which have now become diphthongized again: compare Seoul "classroom" to Hamgyà Âng .
As with all Koreanic varieties, case markers are attached to nouns to show noun case.
Most analyses identify three speech levels of differing formality and deference to the addressee, which are marked by sentence-final verb-ending suffixes, as in other Korean dialects. Some of the more distinctive Hamgyà Âng verb enders include , a casual suffix which elicits confirmation or agreement; the formal suffix and the neutral-level suffix , both of which may be usedâÂÂdepending on the intonationâÂÂfor declarative, interrogative, and imperative moods alike; and the neutral-level propositive suffix . The informal-level suffixes are identical to Standard Korean ones.
Highly unusually, the Hamgyà Âng negative particle (such as 'not', 'cannot') intervenes between the main verb and the auxiliary, unlike in other Koreanic varieties (except Yukjin, also spoken in Hamgyà Âng) where the particle either precedes the main verb or follows the auxiliary.
Specific vocabulary differences include kinship terminology. For example, "father", in standard Korean abà Âji (), becomes abai () or aebi (). Another example would be the use of (ì´)ìÂÂëÂÂ¥ (sà Âm)à Âmdung in the Northeast dialect, as opposed to the standard -ìµëÂÂë¤ seumnida, or the use of -ì¼ eu instead of -ì ui, ì¼르 eureu instead of -ì¼론euro, or -ì¼/르 eu/reu instead of ìÂÂ/를 eul/reul.
<big>Example sentences</big>