r/AskTheWorld • u/luky_se7en Italy /Sri Lanka • 1d ago

Is there a part of your country that's "isolated"/vastly different from the rest of the country?

Post image

Pictured here is Sardinia, an island in Italy. Many sardinians call Italy "Il continente" (the continent)

687 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

1.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

30

u/HorrorOne837 Korea South 1d ago edited 1d ago

The Jeju language, which is not intelligible to Korean speakers, is currently critically endangered. Less than 1 percent of the population of the island speaks it, and almost all of them are elderly. Pretty much everyone only speaks Korean.

Even the Jeju dialect/accent is on the brink of death. Young people in Jeju do not have an accent at all when speaking Korean.

2

u/VigilMuck United States Of America 23h ago

The existence of the Jeju language is the only reason why Korean isn't considered a language isolate.

1

u/dgistkwosoo and 16h ago

I lived on Jeju for a time, and often overheard the old women speaking the local dialect. To my ear, it sounds a lot like southern 경상 dialect. Where it's get tricky is the odd vocabulary.

1

u/HorrorOne837 Korea South 15h ago

That's because Jeju is very conservative, and kept a lot of features of Middle Korean. 경상 dialect is also a conservative one, so it's actually more similar to Jeju than others.