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Jang Chung-deok. 2009. A Study on the jargon of Namsadang. Korean Semantics, 28. The purpose of this paper is to look into the jargon which the members of Namsadang, a traveling company, use and to study its characteristics. Originally, Namsadang was an spontaneously created organization in the common people in later of 19th century, and its members lead unique, stringent community lives which were different from those of others. As ways for protecting their organizations from others and maintaining their secrets, they used their own language, through which they strengthened the unity more firmly and were able to keep the secrets of their organizations. In this paper, we took the inheritors of Namsadang's play as subjects of investigation and personally looked into 250 jargon words which they used. Also, we investigated the meanings and coinage patterns of these words, and tried to explain their origins as far as possible. Up to now, the arts of Namsadang's play have been inherited, but the words which the members of Namsadang used haven't been inherited. It is natural that words can be inherited from one generation to next generations only if they are used in daily community lives. Nonetheless, because a great number of these jargon words are rarely used, they are in the face of disappearance. For the present, a lot of jargon words of Namsadang simply depend on the memories of its elder members. Because of these difficulties, we cannot include many exemplary jargon words in the survey. In many cases, they are different from those in documentary materials. Even a certain word is not registered in <Standard Korean Language Dictionary>, and its meaning is incorrectly interpreted. In conclusion, jargon is a group of words which are used by specific groups or classes in itself. However, as it is a part of Korean Language, it should be systematically investigated and recorded before it completely vanishes.

남사당(Namsadang), 은어(jargon), 특수어(specific words), 어휘(vocabulary), 의미(meaning), 조어 유형(coinage pattern), 어원(the origin of a word), 비유법(figures of speech), 한자 유희(playing with Chinese characters), 음절 도치(inversion of syllables)