KJCKorea
Journal Central

This study looked at the change from o to u appearing in the modern Korean language period and its developmental process in words used in the Seoul area, and how the change has been evaluated in the process of establishing normative linguistic policies such as the <Revised Collection of Standard Korean Language> and the <Standard Language Rules>. As a result of this speculation, the following was discovered: the common change from o to u in sub-dialects of the Korean language has been accepted in the process of revising the standard language to have the status of the standard language. However, the expansion of o to u which has been evaluated to have the typical character of the mid-land dialect including words used in Seoul has been evaluated negatively. As a result, it was discovered that the innovative forms of the change from o to u have the status of non-standard language. Also, this study speculated on the influence negative recognition has on the expansion of the change and the exclusive attitude the evaluation of the standard language has had on novel language by writers who came from Seoul. With the winning novels of the Lee sang Literary Award as the subjects of the study, the expansion of o to u occurred only in grammatical morphemes in the location of non-beginning words in novels published from the 1970s to the 1980s. Recently, such expansion has hardly been seen.

normative linguistic policies, linguistic variation, lexical diffusion, novel language, innovative forms, linguistic perceptions of writers