To clarify the concepts of dialects, vernacular and regional languages used with similar meanings, this study attempted to reveal the usage patterns and concepts of these expressions based on written corpus. The written corpus of printed newspaper articles from the online Naver News Library that archived newspaper articles from 1920 to 1999 and the news article corpus crawled by the online Naver News portal from January 1, 2004 to December 31, 2021 were extracted and analyzed. In particular, this paper analyzed the relationship between collates and keywords based on the corpus linguistic research methodology of the news article corpus for the past eighteen years and how they were being used in official records and press documents by corresponding with the 'dialects, vernacular, and regional languages' in socio-linguistic terms of modern Korean. The results are summarized as follows. First, the concept of linguistic norms that a dialects have terms corresponding to the words or standard languages was established after the 1930s. Second, in the library of newspaper articles published in the 20th century, dialects or vernaculars were perceived as negative objects to be removed in preparation for standard language. Third, it can be seen that the positive value judgment on 'vernacular' has increased in the corpus of news articles over the past decade. Fourth, dialects and vernacular, regional language, and standard language were used to be compatible with each other, and it can been seen that dialects were mainly used in academic contexts and vernacular were mainly used in everyday contexts. Fifth, it can be confirmed that the positive perception of standard language has been maintained in the 20th-century newspaper article corpus and the 21st-century news article corpus for the last eighteen years after the recognition of standard language.

This study investigates phonological variations of the Gyeongsang dialect speakers in dialect contact situations in Seoul. This study also examines what factors have significant effects on these phonological variations. It focuses on social factors: ‘gender’, ‘language attitude’, ‘length of residency in Seoul’ and in particular, ‘age group’ that is classified based on whether the participants received compulsory education where standard Korean is used. The tendency of the phonological variation is disproportionate for each phonological variable. In direct dialect contact situations in Seoul, Gyeongsang dialect speakers undergo phonological variation almost all the phoneme and phonological rule but the relatively low toneme. But this quantitative loffwness of the variation degree on toneme variant is not absent in the knowledge of the phonological pattern of Seoul Korean, but rather is hard to adapt or habituate it. In other words, the achievement of toneme variation requires a certain amount of acquisition period compared to the other variants. This study shows that it may take about 20 years to adapt to the phonological patterns of Seoul Korean. The statistical analysis of phonetic data suggests that all social factors investigated in this study influence a speaker's frequency of use of the Seoul Korean variants. Especially, each age group shows different tendency of influence of social factors. Old speaker group influences by social factors in the following order: ‘gender’, ‘length of residency’ and ‘language attitude’. In the case of young, on the other hand, the order is ‘language attitude’, ‘length of residency’ and ‘gender’.

Cho, Tae-Rin. 2015. “On the change of Korean dialect and dialect research: Beyond the boundary of regional dialect and social dialect”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 23(1). 177~199. The purpose of this paper is to examine the changing shape of regional dialect and social dialect in Korea, finally in order to seek the possibility of change and development direction of the Korean dialect researches. Firstly, this paper reviews not only the conceptual difference between regional dialect and social dialect but also the changing shape of actual relation between regional dialect research and social dialect research in Korea. And then, signs of change in Korean dialect research are analyzed by looking at the current state and characteristics of Korean social dialect research. This analysis shows that the distinction between regional dialect research and social dialect research is no longer rigid, and that Korean dialect research needs a new approach and development direction in order to go beyond the earlier researches focused on regional dialect and level of phoneme, prosody, vocabulary, etc. Finally, this paper is concluded by proposing two development directions of Korean dialect research as follows. (1) Research on regional and social difference of Korean language on a level of discourse. (2) Research on aspect of contact among standard language and dialects in Korea.

This study examines Chungnam dialect speakers’ perceptual dialect boundaries, their images of Korean dialects, and also their auditory ability to distinguish the dialects. Thirty Chungnam residents participated in this research as subjects and performed four tasks: pile-sorting, description of dialect images, dialect recognition, and a short interview. The focus of the study was to examine the informants’ subjective dialect boundaries among Chungnam dialect and geographically adjacent Chungbuk, and Jeonbuk dialects, the informants’ images about these dialects, and their ability to distinguish the three. The results from the tasks suggest that speakers of Chungnam dialect perceive Jeonbuk dialect at least as close as or even closer than Chungbuk dialect. The results from the dialect recognition experiment also reveal auditory-perceptual similarity between Chungnam and Jeonbuk dialects. Chungnam dialect speakers were, in addition, analyzed as having relatively favorable images about their dialect.