The purpose of this paper was to examine the Hongcheon region’s language in terms of phonetics, vocabulary, grammar, and semantics, under the premise that the Hongcheon region in Gangwon-do has commonalities with the central dialect, but that differences are likely to be highlighted. For this purpose, the Hongcheon local language was investigated through 7 informants from 5 villages in 3 myeons in the Hongcheon region.
Overall, the phoneme, vocabulary, grammar, and meaning of the Hongcheon local language do not deviate significantly from the characteristics of the central dialect because it is a central dialect. To summarize them, First, tones do not appear in phonemes, and ‘ㅓ(ə)’ is changed to ‘ㅡ:(ɨ:)’ and ‘ㅕ(jə)’ is pronounced long by changing to ‘ᆜ(jɨ)’. Second, the phenomenon of consonant replacement, including pre-aspirated and aspirated consonants, occurs less frequently than in southern dialects, but occurs similarly to other dialects in the Gangwon region. In particular, the phenomenon of palatalization, where ‘ㄱ/k/’ changes to ‘ㅈ/c/’, occurs widely. Third, the umlaut phenomenon occurs with almost the same frequency as in other regions, and most vowel replacements are predominantly replaced by front vowels. The fourth characteristic of the vocabulary is that there were many cases where nativelanguage vocabulary was replaced with Chinese characters, and archaic words were also maintained. Fifth, in terms of the semantics of vocabulary, there are cases where the dialect type explains the object more clearly than the standard language, and several vocabulary words with different meaning areas were reviewed, and compared to standard language, there were some words that were more detailed, and there was also a tendency to recognize them as being completely different.