page_title: Jeju language
section_title: History and decline
hierarchical_section_title: Jeju language / History and decline
caption_attribution_description: English: Jeju citizens awaiting execution in May 1948. 한국어: 제주 4.3 사건 중 사형을 기다리는 시민들
context_page_description: Jeju, often called Jejueo or Jejuan in English-language scholarship, is a Koreanic language traditionally spoken in Jeju Island, South Korea. While often classified as a divergent Jeju dialect of the Korean language, the variety is referred to as a language in local government and increasingly in both South Korean and foreign academia. Jeju is not mutually intelligible with the mainland dialects of South Korea.
  The consonants of Jeju are similar to those of Seoul Korean, but Jeju has a larger and more conservative vowel inventory. Jeju is a head-final, agglutinative, suffixing language like Korean. Nouns are followed by particles that may function as case markers. Verbs inflect for tense, aspect, mood, evidentiality, relative social status, formality, and other grammatical information. Korean and Jeju differ significantly in their verbal paradigms. For instance, the continuative aspect marker of Jeju and the mood or aspect distinction of many Jeju connective suffixes are absent in Korean. While most of the Jeju lexicon is Koreanic, the language preserves many Middle Korean words now lost in Standard Korean.
context_section_description: The Koreanic languages are likely not native to Jeju Island; it has been proposed that the family has its roots in Manchuria, a historical region in northeastern Asia. It is thought that Koreanic speakers migrated from southern Manchuria between the third and eighth centuries CE. Linguist Alexander Vovin suggests that the ancient kingdom of Tamna, which ruled the island until the twelfth century, may have spoken a Japonic language that left a substrate influence on Jeju. When exactly this putative Japonic language may have been replaced by the Koreanic ancestor of Jeju remains unclear.
  Unlike mainland Korea, which was ruled only indirectly by the Mongols, Jeju was placed under direct Yuan administration in the late thirteenth century. Significant numbers of Mongol soldiers migrated to the island during this period, and their language acted as a superstratum that may have accelerated local language change. Linguist Yang Changyong speculates that the formation of Jeju as a language independent of Korean was influenced by Mongol. By the fifteenth century, when the invention of Hangul permits a detailed understanding of Korean phonology for the first time, Seoul Korean and Jeju were already divergent; the Seoul prestige dialect of fifteenth-century Middle Korean disallowed the diphthong /jʌ/, but Jeju does not.
  Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century references to the language of Jeju by mainland Korean literati state that it was already unintelligible to mainland Koreans.  Kim Sang-heon (1570―1652), who served as pacification commissioner (Korean: 안무어사 anmueosa) on the island from 1601 to 1602, gives six words in the "provincial language" with clear cognates in modern Jeju and also writes:
  謫人 申長齡 乃譯官也 嘗曰 「比島語音 酷以中華 如驅牛馬之聲 尤不可分辯云云 盖風氣與華不隔而然耶 曾爲元朝所據置官於此故與華相雜而然耶」... 所謂俚語者 但高細不可曉
  "The exiled man Shin Jangnyeong was originally a government interpreter. He said, 'The language of this island is most like Chinese, and the sounds they make while driving cattle and horses are yet more impossible to tell apart. Is this because the climate is not far from that of China, or because the Yuan dynasty once ruled and appointed officials here and the Chinese mingled with them?'... What is called the provincial language is but high and thin and cannot be understood."
  In 1629, the Korean government banned the emigration of Jeju Islanders to the mainland, further restricting linguistic contacts between Jeju and Korean. At the same time, the island was also used throughout the Joseon era (1392―1910) as a place of exile for disgraced scholar-officials. These highly educated speakers of Seoul Korean often tutored the children of their Jeju neighbors during their exile and established a continuous and significant Seoul Korean superstratum in Jeju.
  Jeju remained the dominant language of both private and public spheres under Japanese colonial rule (1910―1945), although many Japanese loanwords entered the lexicon, and many speakers were monolingual. Large-scale migration of Jeju people to Japan began in 1911, and 38,000 Jeju Islanders lived in Osaka alone by 1934. Immigration to Japan continued even after Korean independence into the 1980s. Jeju is still spoken by older members of these diaspora communities, although younger individuals speak Japanese as their native language and are not fluent in Jeju.
  Severe disruption to the Jeju language community began after the end of Japanese rule in 1945. Popular opposition to the division of Korea and police brutality led to a rebellion against the American military government on April 3, 1948. The Syngman Rhee regime, which succeeded the American administration in August 1948, suppressed the rebellion with mass killings of civilians. As many as sixty thousand Jeju Islanders, or a full fifth of the pre-rebellion population, were killed. Forty thousand more fled to Japan. Out of the four hundred villages of the island, only 170 remained. The devastating impact of the massacres on the Jeju language community was exacerbated by the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. While Jeju was never occupied by the North Korean 
caption: Jeju inhabitants awaiting execution in late 1948
exif: {"Image XResolution": "96", "Image YResolution": "96", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "paint.net 4.2.15"}