Research on the History of the Korean Language and Korean Linguistics in N orth Korea

There has not been very much research or annotation done in North Korea on Korean historical linguistic data. The only area in which there has been significant achievement is the annotation of data written in non-hangûl scripts. The fundamental reason for this lack of results in the absence of such basic initial efforts as the photoprinting and annotation of texts and the compilation of a dictionary of pre-modern Korean. The study of the history of the Korean language may be divided into internal and external histories, and research in the North has shown a tendancy to try to advance from internal to external history. North Korean scholars have never made a clear distinction between the history of the Korean language and the history of Korean linguistics. There has been relative progress in the areas of the geneology of Korean, non-hangûl scripts(borrowed characters), phonological history, and grammatical history, but the area of lexical history has been sorely neglected. The only real book on the history of Korean linguistics published in the North is Kim Pyǒng-Jes History of Korean Linguistics (1984). Research has been relatively active in the areas of Hunmin-jǒngǔm and Chu Shi-Gyǒng, but in general research in the area of Korean linguistic history has been limited and confined to a very narrow scope