A History of Jejueo

Abstract

A driving concern of this dissertation is to develop a clearer picture of the history of the Koreanic language family by examining Jejueo’s linguistic development over time. I aim to shed light on the relationships both between Jejueo and the modern dialects of Korean, and the contact effects that neighboring languages have had on Jejueo. My dissertation field work has two related aims: first I examine the linguistic ties between Jejueo and Middle Korean to try to determine the approximate period during which Jejueo split off from an earlier form of Korean. My second aim is to analyze Jejueo as it is spoken in the Osakan community, to isolate which features appear to be earlier forms of Jejueo now lost on Jeju Island, from features which have developed within this community due to linguistic contact with the majority language, Japanese, and to determine which features, if any, are due to internal linguistic changes over the last 100 years and are unique to Osakan Jejueo. Likewise, I examine Jejueo as it is currently spoken on Jeju Island, South Korea, to analyze contact effects from Modern Standard Korean (MSK) owing to 60 years of intensive language contact, as well as internal developments within Jejueo in the Jeju and Osaka communities. I apply the comparative method to try to identify the approximate period in which Jejueo split off from Korean to become an independent language. The Jejueo spoken in Osaka is widely considered by Jejueo linguists to be a more conservative form of Jejueo that maintains more features of MK than the Jejueo spoken under heavy Korean influence on Jeju Island. Yet, little linguistic research has been conducted in the Osakan Jejueo community. My dissertation research will fill a gap in this knowledge, and in turn, shed light on some features of the early development of Korean. In short, I found that Jejueo split off from Korean between approximately 1300-1500 CE based on the timing of structural changes in MK and the history of migration to Jeju Island. Currently, two separate varieties of Jejueo are developing on Jeju Island and in Osaka as a result of the two different contact environments. Both the variety in Jeju and the variety in Osaka, however, show evidence of language attrition and a shift to Modern Standard Korean. In Jeju, the pattern of language shift to MSK is clear, and the generations of Jejueo speakers are diverging to a greater and greater extent due to contact pressure from MSK and language ideologies that favor the prestige language. In Osaka the picture is complicated in part by the diversity of languages in the linguistic marketplace of Tsuruhashi. Here, Jejueo speakers are trilingual, and often know multiple varieties of Korean. The Jejueo spoken by Jeju immigrants in Osaka conserves forms that have been lost on Jeju Island in the last decades, but these diverse lexemes and grammatical morphemes are also continuously evolving under contact with Korean.