Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Though many provinces and cities have distinct accents, Jeju Island is probably the only
place in South Korea where it could be argued that a full-blown separate language has been
maintained. The local dialect shares some vocabulary and basic sentence structures with
standard Korean, but still makes use of archaic expressions that either aren't used on the
mainland anymore or were never used there at all, many of which exhibit strong Mongo-
lian and Manchu influences. One example is
oreum,
the Jeju-dialect word for mountain or
hill, which sounds a lot like the Mongolian for the same thing but apparently has nothing in
common with the standard Korean
me
or
san.
