For a great example of what the Metropolitician was talking about in this post when he mentioned the “cheese factor” in Korea, check out this Youtube of an ad produced by the Hangul Love Campaign for this year’s Hangul Day. Here’s a literal English translation of what it says — remember, this is an ad exhorting Koreans to simply use their own fricking alphabet. It’s like if there was a campaign to encourage Americans and Germans and so on to continue using Roman letters.
우리 한글 제대로 사용하고 있습니까?
올바른 한글 사용은 우리 문화를 지키는 일입니다
아름다운 우리 한글을 사랑합시다Are you making good use of our hangul?
Proper use of hangul grows our culture.
Let’s love our beautiful hangul.
The keener-eared among can perhaps confirm — isn’t the woman in the voiceover the same one announcing the stops on some of the Seoul Metro lines?
11/10/2008 at 12:42 pm Permalink
The voice also sounds like the same woman on the CDs for the “말하기 쉬운 한국어” series of books from 성균관대학교. As a side note, it’s a great series of books and CDs for improving listening and speaking skills.
11/10/2008 at 1:39 pm Permalink
An ad campaign dedicated to a language… Directed at people who speak the language…?
Umm.. Why?
12/10/2008 at 9:15 pm Permalink
There *are* some aspects of this, but it manifests differently in other societies. Think of the grammarians in our lives who debate over using the oxford comma or whether to put an “a” or an “an” in front of words like “historical”. There’s also small but dedicated scribe communities throughout the Americas and Europe – but of the two, I’d say that this is closer to the “good grammarian” kind of campaign. We should remember too that while “hangeul” technically refers only to the written form, it is often used as a way to refer to the Korean language in a broader sense.
That said, I think you could also argue that hangeul does have a somewhat different place in the Korean mindset than roman letters have in western languages – while roman letters are widely used to represent the sounds of a multitude of languages, hangeul remains a potent cultural marker. It has (despite being “the most scientific language on earth” hahaha) not become a major mode of writing for any language other than Korean, and for that reason usage is also contained mostly among ethnic Koreans, who use it only for that language. In other words, in some way it really is special to and for Koreans.