방언 분화와 방언 구획

On the Dialectal Variation and the Division of Dialect Areas

In this paper, we try to explain some aspects of the dialectal variation and the methodology of dividing dialect areas. The dialectal variation includes phono - logical, morphological, syntactic, semantic and lexical variation. It is true that the bundle of isoglosses is used in subdividing some dialect areas. However, the bundle being represented on the map, it is not easy to count the exact number of isoglosses. Therefore, Jean Séguy proposed the method of linguistic distance instead. The concept of linguistic distance is a simple one:using as large a number items as the survey data supply, the responses from two neighboring localities are compared and the number of items in which they disagree is counted. when this number is reduced to a percentage of the total number of items considered, the result is the linguistic distance between those two localities. Japanese scholar Shibata revised this method to compare the two localities which are not neighboring but far from each other. When we use the preceding methods, Korean language can be divided into six or seven primary dialects and each primary dialect allows the secondary division of three or four subdialects. Though there are no theoretical limits in dividing subdialects, third or fourth divisions have usually been tried in the practical works.