Retrospect and Prospect on Korean Dialectology

Korean dialectology has a sixty years' history. The dawn of the twentieth century saw the beginning of an era of fruitful works on the dialectological studies in Korean dialects. The dialect studies done before the Liberation from Japan was fundamently a philological-historical descipline. These studies which may be characterized as atomistic and historical phonology are a survey of national (big-area) word geography. After the Liberation, Korean dialectology tended to be descriptive with special attention to systematizing phonological patterns and morphological categories for small-area dialects. In recent years, it attempts to make systematic and adequate descriptions of phonological and syntactic rules