North Korea used October 9th, the day the creation of Korea’s writing script is commemorated in South Korea, to criticize the use of loan words in the South.
‘Uriminjokkiri,’ one of North Korea’s main propaganda websites, released an article on Sunday, ‘The Tragic Reality Where Our Language and Script Are Disdained,” in which it claimed, “In South Chosun, the nature of this nation will disappear if our language and script are trampled over and their purity distorted as is happening now.”
“This will do huge damage in the process of national reunification,” the article went on.
“The majority of magazines and broadcast programs have titles like ‘Inside World,’ ‘News Maker,’ ‘News People,’ ‘News Line,’ ‘News Today,’ ‘News Evening,’ and so on,” it noted, claiming, “It is hard to distinguish whether it is a foreign country or South Chosun soil.”
The article further denounced the South Korean policy on the learning of English, stating, “With their ‘English education enhancement policy’, the authorities of South Chosun have established an unthinkable policy banning students from using our language and only using English.”
This, it concluded, is a crime.
Ironically, the use of loanwords from Chinese and Russian, not to mention those derived from South Korean dramas, is actually quite common in North Korea, even though the North Korean authorities have a policy prohibiting their use.
