Another ‘language that failed’?

Abstract

This paper examines the linguistic features of Korean-language publications issued in the Russian Far East (RFE) between 1922 and 1937, the year all Koreans in the RFE were deported to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, and tries to answer the questions “Can we speak of a separate ‘Soviet’ Korean written language, and if so, what were its defining characteristics?” Moreover, “If there was a ‘Soviet’ Korean written language, or at least the appearances of such, was this by design or by accident?” In order to answer these questions, the paper examines published materials in Korean from the RFE alongside metalinguistic statements about the Korean language and Korean language policy penned by relevant Korean intellectuals and Soviet commentators. The main argument is that we can indeed detect an incipient case of ‘language making’ and the beginnings of a distinct ‘Soviet Korean’ written language congealing in the years leading up to the deportation of 1937. But this was more by accident than by design, and owed on the one hand to the peculiar constellation of language policies, Soviet Korean language and orthographic ideologies, and Korean dialect facts in the RFE, and on the other hand to the relative shallowness of Korean language standardization on the peninsula itself. Any further developments in the way of Soviet Korean ‘language making’ were nipped in the bud by the deportation of 1937 and the discontinuation of Korean language education in schools from 1938. As a result, written Soviet Korean ceased to exist, and spoken Soviet Korean – Koryŏmal – became completed “unroofed”; the Soviet Koreans became a “rag doll nation” within the USSR, and spoken Soviet Korean/Koryŏmal became a “rag doll language.”