New Korean Orthography | |
Chosŏn'gŭl | 조선어신철자법 |
---|---|
Hancha | 朝鮮語新綴字法 |
Revised Romanization | Joseoneo sincheoljabeop |
McCune–Reischauer | Chosŏnŏ sinch’ŏlchapŏp |
The New Korean Orthography was a spelling reform used in North Korea from 1948–1954. It added five consonants and one vowel letter to the hangul alphabet, making it what is believed to be a more morphophonologically "clear" approach to the Korean language.
After the establishment of the North Korean government in 1945, the North Korean Provisional People's Committee began a language planning campaign on the Soviet model. Originally, both North Korean and South Korean Hangul script was based on the Unified Plan promulgated in 1933 under the Japanese. The goals of the independent North Korean campaign were to increase literacy, re-standardize Hangul to form a "New Korean" that could be used as a cultural weapon of revolution, and eliminate the use of Hanja (Chinese characters). The study of Russian was also made compulsory from middle school onward, and communist terminology—such as , People's Army, and People's Liberation War—were rapidly assimilated into Korean. The ban on Hanja in 1949 (excepting parenthetical references in scientific and technical publications) was part of a language purification movement which sought to replace Sino-Korean vocabulary and loanwords from Japanese with native neologisms on the grounds that they were "reactionary" and separated the literary intelligentsia from the masses. New dictionaries, monolingual and bilingual Russian-Korean, were to be based on the concept of "self-reliance" (juche); place names and personal names modeled after Chinese naming practices were also purged and replaced with socialist concepts.