Crossing Divides: Two Koreas divided by a fractured language

[DFW]

1. It's not the literary version of a language that changes so often, but rather the living language

I notice the changes in languages I use frequently in the countries where they are spoken. We look at German TV shows from the 1970s and laugh at some of the expressions we hear, even though we were using them back then, too. Even more telling are East German shows from that era. They had a distinctive vocabulary all their own, although their media was 100% Party controlled, so it didn't reflect the spoken language completely.

My biggest awakening was the first time I visited Russia a little over 20 years ago. I had read Dostoyevsky and Gogol in college, but had never before been exposed to day-to-day post-Soviet era slang. I found myself struggling to understand people in the street who understood me perfectly. Some of them asked if I had had had a nice sleep these last 100 years, since my spoken Russian had never evolved to reflect 20th century slang. Since we never read any Soviet-era lit except for one short story of Vassily Aksyonov, we never got the chance to speak the living language. North Koreans experiencing the South for the first time will be subjected to a similar linguistic adjustment. Figure it's like someone from Mississippi, on his first trip outside of Mississippi, landing in London and hearing, "that wanker couldn't get his gear out of the boot, and couldn't even find the loo on his own."

Better yet, get National Lampoon's "European Vacation" and watch the scene where the Griswold family arrives at their hotel in London.