Language and Social Institutions: Koryo Saram, Part II

Whereas my previous blog post outlined the lives and livelihoods of ethnic Koreans in the Russian Far East prior to their exile in 1937, my next two posts will shift gears slightly, focusing more on the status of the Korean language among Koryo saram throughout the past century. This post will track the maintenance of the Korean language from the perspective of more formal social institutions such as newspapers, language policy, and Korean language pedagogy.

What is the language of the Koryo saram?

This question is undeniably tricky to answer. By virtue of their name, we might first associate a variety of Korean with the Koryo saram. This was, indeed, the case. Today, there are very few Korean-language speakers left, most having taken up Russian as their primary language. In this way, Russian is undeniably a language of the Koryo saram. This blog series will, however, be looking at the story of the Korean varieties spoken by the modern Koryo saram as well as their ancestors.

This map distinguishes seven varieties of Korean.[1] They can be called “dialects”, but this term is often too polarized to be of any use. While the peninsular varieties are largely mutually intelligible – if readily distinguishable from one another – the Jeju is sometimes considered a separate language, and Yukchin a subdialect of the Hamgyeong variety with many Middle Korean archaisms.

The migrants from the Korean Peninsula spoke varieties of Korean, chiefly the Hamgyeong and Yukchin varieties[FN to KING]. As processes of language contact affected both the speech of the Koryo saram and that of the Koreans on the peninsula, a quite distinctive variety emerged among the Koryo saram called Koryo mar. This is the language of the elderly Korean speakers of the Koryo saram community[FN]. It is mostly mutually intelligible with the modern Seoul standard variety. However, both varieties have many imported words (in Koryo mar, from Russian and Turkic languages; in the Seoul standard, mainly from English). Furthermore, the dialectal differences between the ancestors of both varieties still exist, further hindering communication.

Early Divergences – Newspapers from the 1920s

The language of the Koryo saram was different from the language of the majority of the Korean Peninsula from the beginning, as the majority of the Peninsula spoke the Central dialect. Being a part – willingly or not – of the “Russian” sphere of the world and the Japanese sphere set further divergences into motion. These are readily visible when comparing newspaper clippings. Below are two newspapers. The first is a Koryo saram publication; the second is a Korean Peninsula one. Both were published in 1923.

Exile

In September of 1937, nearly the entire population of ethnic Koreans living in the Far East and Maritime regions of the Soviet Union were forcibly displaced to Central Asia. In total, over 170,000 individuals were put on trains and shipped out to the Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan SSRs, where they were later dispersed throughout different areas in the Soviet Union.

Accompanying this exile was a widespread purge of Koryo saram communist party officials. Accused of being spies, these individuals were executed, dealing a massive blow to leadership and organization within the Koryo saram community.

The journey of over 4,000 miles across took approximately one month to complete. Conditions on the train were dire, and the trains themselves eventually became known as “Ghost Trains”, in reference to the many who died on the journey.

The displaced Koreans were removed from their cities, homes, and farms in the Far East and quite literally “dumped” out into the unfamiliar lands of Central Asia. The Soviets provided limited provisions for the Koryo saram, leaving their resettlement largely in the hands of local Kazakhstani and Uzbekistani SNKs (Council of People’s Commissars).

With the deportations beginning in September and continuing over the next three months, most Koryo saram arrived in Central Asia in late autumn and early winter. This seasonal fact was calamitous to the already devastated people. With little wood to construct houses, many Koreans in Ushtobe were forced to dig holes in the ground to escape the bitter winter winds.

The exile and forced displacement did much more than move people from one place to another. It threatened to kill the very roots of ethnic Korean identity in the Soviet Union. The land the Koryo saram had tilled, their houses, their schools, their printing presses, and their communities were razed, leaving an intense struggle for mere survival for the first few years in Central Asia.

Data regarding language use during these early years in Central Asia is rather scarce. However, after a few more years, more and more consistent publications emerge in the Korean language. In fact, some of the very same social institutions that had facilitated the language in the Far East came to be reconstructed in Central Asia. Why, then, did the Koryo saram shift to Russian more rapidly after their forced movement. The sections below will explore some of these language-facilitating institutions, all the while working toward identifying causes of language shift.

Newspapers

Newspapers have a long history among the Koryo saram. The first such publication was the Shinhan Minbo (1904), published by the Military People’s Association. The Haejo Shinmun was first published in Vladivostok in 1907, the Daedong Shinbo in 1909, and the Daeyangbo in May 1911.

Lenin Kichi – “Lenin’s Banner”

The Lenin Kichi was an almost-daily (6 days/week) Korean-language newspaper published in the Kazakhstan SSR from 1938 to 1990. Chung (2006) notes that, though it was published in Korean and distributed throughout Koryo saram kolkhozes, few people – if any – could still read it. Kho (1987: 112) notes that the language in the Lenin Kichi largely adheres to North Korean orthographic norms (a statement that my limited dataset does not yet confirm), and that this “literary Korean” in the newspaper was very different from the language as it was actually spoken at the time. In this way, we begin to see cracks in the veneer of “inclusive” Soviet language policies. Nominally, Korean-language media was available and, to some extent, encouraged. This language was, however, completely out of touch with its intended audience.

Koryo Ilbo – “The Koryo Daily News”

The fall of the Soviet Union saw the reorganization of many social structures within these suddenly “post-Soviet” states. Naturally, one of the first items to be done away with was the newspaper title Lenin Kichi. Its successor is the Koryo Ilbo, and it is still published in Kazakhstan. It is just one of several newspapers and magazines published with a Koryo saram target audience.

This newspaper is bilingual in Russian and Korean, but seems to be more oriented toward Russian speakers, something that is perhaps indicated by the first article of each edition appearing in Russian.

The picture below features a piece from the recurring “Russian-Korean Dictionary” section of the Koryo Ilbo.

It is called “Russian-Korean Dictionary”, but functions more like a phrasebook. In each issue, these general phrases are clustered around a theme meant to aid the readers in real-world Korean-speaking situations such as ordering food (this issue), crossing a border (issue #45), and getting around town (various issues).

The phrases above are given in three columns. First is the Russian text, next is the Korean translation in the han’geul script, then finally the Cyrillic transliteration of the Korean han’geul. This structure leads us to the obvious – but still very important – idea that this section is intended more for Russian speakers learning Korean than Korean speakers learning Russian. Interestingly, the third column with the transcription was first added in issue #41 (October 23, 2020). We can make all kinds of inferences as to why this transliteration has been added to more recent issues. Perhaps readership has expanded to include non-Koryo saram. Perhaps the Koryo saram this newspaper targets are largely unfamiliar with the han’geul script, thus necessitating a transliteration. In any case, the authors of this section found providing a transliteration to be necessary, so we can assume at least a sizeable group within the readership does not know han’geul.

National Theatre

The Far Eastern Regional Korean Theatre was founded in 1932 in Vladivostok, and exists to this day in Almaty, Kazakhstan. The theatre has the unusual history of being deported along with its actors. One part of the theatre ended up in Kazaskhstan (at first, Kyzyl Orda, later Almaty), the other in Tashkent.

Though beginning as three different theatre groups in Vladivostok, when forcibly moved to the Kazakhstan SSR, these groups formed one unified national Korean theatre. It was one of seven national theatres active in Almaty.

The activities of the theatre featured prominently in the Lenin Kichi. On the 50th anniversary of the founding of the theatre, the newspaper even ran a whole-page article entitled “The 50th Anniversary of the Proud Soviet Korean Art (On the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the Establishment of the Kazakh Republic National Korean Music and Comedy Theatre)” (Kho, 1987: 141).

Though underscored as a pillar of the Koryo saram community (see Kho, 156), the theatre began shifting to more Russian-language productions. This shift was expedited by the lack of Koryo saram actors able to speak Korean and the smaller crowds that Korean-language productions would bring. Furthermore, there were fewer teachers of traditional Korean song and dance available.

Schooling

Whereas Korean language instruction suffered greatly during the Japanese occupation period, in the Far East, the Korean language enjoyed a fair degree of use as a medium of instruction. With Korean schools being offered officially from 1923 and the unification of the Soviet Korean script in the 1930s, the use of Korean appeared to be expanding in its domains of use among the Koryo saram, reaching all levels of education.

Unfortunately, I have been unable to gather much data regarding the use of Korean in schools in the period immediately following the forced displacement of the Koryo saram. Additionally, the period just after their movement is comprised of the years of World War II, a time in which little attention would likely have been devoted to developing Korean language learning materials for students.

Kho (1987) has managed to track down a few readers used in Uzbekistan for elementary-aged students, as well as evidence of the Korean language being actively taught in the SSR. Still, it appears as though by the 1980s, Korean had fallen completely out of use in schools. There does not seem to be any law expressly prohibiting the use of Korean as a language of instruction. The answer to why Korean was no longer used in schools likely has something to do with its utility among would-be speakers. Russian would have been a far more “economic” choice of language knowledge. At this point, this blog post can only speculate about why the Korean language was no longer deemed useful to the Koryo saram. In any case, in addition to not being seen as “useful”, it is also very likely that the Korean language lacked the prestige (a measure of social capital) that other languages would have offered. This question will be explored more thoroughly in my next blog post.

The Korean Language at Summer Camp

Over the past three decades, with the normalizing of relations between South Korea and former Soviet Republics, South Korean language teachers have been welcomed into Central Asia. Jeongmin An (2020) surveys these observations of South Korean teachers as they taught the Korean language at a 2019 summer camp which lasted for ten days and nine nights. The students were some 80 Koryo saram youth from Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, and Tajikistan.

Teachers noted that while many of the students knew very little Korean (some not knowing more than “My name is…”), many students who did know some of the language seemed to know words from K-pop.

One teacher expressed his frustration over the use of “cutesie” speech among his students, and he attributed its appearance in his class to its widespread usage among K-pop stars. The default polite ending for a Korean verb is the suffix “-yo”. We hear this in things like the greeting annyeonghaseyo “hello” or saranghaeyo “I love you”. A more recent development in Korean is a way to make speech sound “cuter” by adding an -ng to the -yo ending, giving something like annyeonghaseyong. In English, this might be like saying “hewwo” instead of “hello”. Apparently, students love to add this to their speech. While deeply amusing to me, I can understand the ire of a prescriptivist teacher trying his best to teach “proper” Korean.

The Future of Koryo Mar

Language death is a painful topic, no matter how many times it happens or how “natural” it may be in contact situations. A professor in college always advised me to think of languages that are no longer spoken not as “dead”, but as dormant. In this way, we can imagine these varieties being revived and/or reclaimed one day. This is exactly what happened with Hebrew, and what is ongoing throughout the Americas with indigenous languages like Ojibwe, Navajo, and Lakota, among so many others.

Regardless of the effort and well-wishes put into these reclamation efforts, the success of the program is constrained by a host of societal factors including relative prestige of the language being reclaimed, resources to devote to the efforts (teachers, books, curriculum), and motivation to learn the language. One of the most important factors is the applicability of a variety in a learner’s life. If young Koryo saram are learning Korean at all, in order to immediately utilize it, they need to learn a variety that is widely used elsewhere. For this reason, I believe it to be highly unlikely that Koryo mar will see a resurgence in use and transmission.

Instead, though Koryo mar may well become further and further restricted in its usage, there may be room yet for a reconnection with a Korean language modeled on a South Korean variety.

Whereas this blog post examined formal institutions that facilitate language, my next blog post will focus on language transmission on an interpersonal and intergenerational level. It will look at how language indexes parts of identity, and how elements of both language and culture can thrive long after a language falls out of vernacular use.