CHINESE CHARACTERS IN MODERN KOREA

Being a part of the Chinese cultural area, the Korean Peninsula adopted Chinese characters and literary language in the first centuries C.E. Nevertheless, its colloquial language remained native Korean, genealogically and typologically different from Chinese, and in the first half of the 15th century the Korean alphabet was created. From the end of the 19th century, Korean was proclaimed the official written language, although the mixed script was mainly used (Sinokorean words were written in Chinese characters, and native words and grammatical formants in Korean alphabet).

After liberation from the Japanese colonial rule (1910-1945), both the North and the South proclaimed abolition of writing in Chinese characters. But unlike the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, in the Republic of Korea the transition dragged on for more than half a century. And though at schools of both Korean states Chinese characters are still being taught, young generation has a rather low level of their knowledge.

Upon thorough analysis of current South Korean newspapers and other materials, the author has made the conclusion that nowadays the usage of Chinese characters even in the South is extremely limited and is in fact occasional and depends on: 1) the topic of the text (it is present more widely in historical and classical literature); 2) the need to distinguish homonyms and difficult words with an unclear meaning; 3) writer’s preferences. Using Chinese characters is a personal choice, and one can choose to replace them with more wordy expressions instead.

At the same time the article concludes that it is necessary to teach Chinese characters in certain quantities to students, including those majoring in Korean studies at non-linguistics universities including MGIMO. This recommendation takes into consideration, first, the existence of a huge layer of Sinokorean words (social and political vocabulary, terminology), which requires elementary knowledge of Chinese characters for better understanding; second, the task of reading current South Korean newspapers with some Chinese characters used, not to mention older publications written in mixed script.

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