驻华韩国人的韩语使用情况考察

Abstract

Speech communities are the basic units in examining social phenomena caused by language contact. People speaking Korean form a rather large speech community in China, and various other minor groups exist within the Korean speech community. Ethnic Koreans and Korean residents are the two major constituents of Korean speech communities in China. These groups use Korean as their native language while integrating Chinese at work and in their daily lives. However, various differences exist between the two groups. First of all, their nationality differs. Another difference is that Ethnic Korean speech communities have been formed over a long period of time, while Korean residents’ speech communities have a short history. Also, in the case of language variation, the former contains a variety of variations in terms of voice, vocabulary, and grammar. On the other hand, the latter shows variations mostly in vocabulary. By examining language variations of Korean residents’ speech communities in China, the kinds of variations and its origins shall be examined in-depth. Koreans living in China normally use Korean to communicate with one another but their usage is quite different from the Korean used by Koreans living in Korea. A major difference is shown in vocabulary. A variation in vocabulary could roughly be analyzed in two forms; coating Korean-like pronunciation to Chinese vocabulary is one and mixing Korean and Chinese by directly embedding Chinese vocabulary in the Korean language structure is the other. In this case however, Chinese vocabulary adapts the Korean phonetic system and its original tone features become barely noticeable. In such situations, the Chinese vocabulary behaves similarly to loanwords embedded in the Korean language. Again, this mixture of language is divided into habitual and conscious mixture. The conscious mixture is described as a phenomenon easily seen among Chinese language learners (Korean speakers learning Chinese) who use Chinese vocabulary consciously in the Korean language structure to enhancearniir learning and memorization of Chinese. In this case, the learners put great effort to maintain the Chinese phonetic system. Therefore, this study excludes the conscious mixture phenomenon. By analyzing the usage of Korean among Koreans residing in China, the language features shown in their speech and its causes would be discussed more fully.