Foreigners living in Seoul seldom travel around the rest of the country as much as they’d like to, and Koreans living in Seoul seem to do it even less. Hence the popularity of a television program like Travelogue Korea (한국기행), which brings the remote island and mountain villages to Seoulites rather than the other way around. Part of the problem has to do with the sheer capital-centricity, unrivaled in Japan or even England and France, that makes Seoul the city where nearly everybody wants to live and almost nobody needs to leave. (I used to make fun of that, before I realized that I describe everyone in America as living in either Los Angeles, New York, or “someplace weird.”) But though Korea may not have any other cities in Seoul’s league, it does have other big cities, all conveniently connected by the high-speed KTX train, each possessed of its own distinct history and culture.
None has a culture more distinct than that of Busan, Korea’s second-largest metropolis. Located on the southeast coast, almost as far as a South Korean city can get from from Seoul and still be on the peninsula, Busan long served as the country’s main entrepôt, giving it a reputation as an international sort of place even in the centuries pre-modern Korea spent as a “hermit kingdom.” Historically, many of the arrivals into Busan came from nearby Japan (a distance one can now ferry across in three hours), and that cultural influence still manifests still manifests in the accents of the locals. I can attest to the conspicuousness of the effect Japanese sounds have on Korean speech; I happen to study Japanese as well as Korean, and speaking the former has had enough influence on the way I speak the latter that a Korean tells me I “talk like a Japanese person” at least once every few weeks.
Not that my Japanese skills, such as they are, have helped me get much of a handle on Busan-style Korean. Busanians speak with not just their own accent but in their own dialect, or saturi (사투리), which at its richest can leave Korean-speakers — even native Korean-speakers — accustomed to the relatively clear version of the language spoken in Seoul in a state of incomprehension. To put this in geographical perspective, Seoul and Busan lie about as far apart from each other as do Los Angeles and San Francisco; Angelenos and San Franciscans may not see eye-to-eye on everything, but it’s impossible to imagine ascribing their communication breakdowns to differences in regional speech alone. But then, California hasn’t had the oft-referenced “5,000 years of unbroken history” in which the various cultures within Korea have developed and differentiated.
Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books.