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.