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The Functions of Hypercorrection and Sound changes in progress of the Late 19th century Regional Dialects of Korean

Jeonseung Choi 1

1전북대학교

Candidate

ABSTRACT

It is now well established fact that in order to gain greater insights into the dynamic nature of the synchronic structure and system of Modern Korean as well as its regional dialects, it is one of the prerequisites to study and understand in earnest many kinds of linguistic changes in progress of the late 19th century Korean, which represents the last historic period of Recent Korean. With the advent of late 19th century in the history of Korean language, we could at last approach via much linguistic materials published at those time in many parts of Korean peninsular the real events of the convergences and divergences in regional dialects of Recent Korean. Through many linguistic studies accomplished so far on that historical period, now we understand that the linguistic states of regional dialects at the time of late 19th century in many parts of Korean peninsular were characterized by continuing variations of many types resulting from increasing changes and much modifications of Recent Korean. With this premise born in mind, I have observed two kinds of hypercorrection, which occurred at that period in independent linguistic materials respectively. The one was the standard norm oriented overt hypercorrections appeared in the corpus of tonglipsinmun(1894. 4. 7.-1898. 5. 30.), which was the first private news paper published in Korea written with pure contemporary Central dialect including that of Seoul. The other was the covert norm oriented hyperdialectalism appeared in the traditional dialect materials comprising of old commercial novels published mainly in the district of Cheon-ju area as well as the old manuscripts of pansori edited and modified by Shin jae-hyo, who was born in Kochang in the year of 1812. The results of this investigation showed a significant number of instances of hypercorrect linguistic behaviours, not so far reported on. In this paper I’d like to suggest that these types of hyper-correction offer important insights into the nature of the sociolinguistic system which operated in the real contemporary speech communities of late 19th century.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.