The status of Jejueo: endangered language or disappearing dialect?

Abstract

ABSTRACT We examine a controversy involving the politics of bilingualism as it pertains to Jejueo (ISO 639–3 jje), the critically endangered variety of speech indigenous to Jeju, Korea’s island province. Although Jejueo is officially classified as a non-standard dialect of Korean, members of the community are now calling for its recognition as a distinct language and for a corresponding change in the country’s language policy. In order to shed new light on this controversy, we adopt an experimental methodology that was initially developed for measuring cross-linguistic intelligibility in three European language families. The results of two experiments establish that the intelligibility of Jejueo to speakers of Korean is remarkably low – roughly at the same level as the intelligibility of Italian to speakers of French. We conclude that Jejueo deserves to be recognised as a distinct language.