‘국어의 사상’을 넘어선다는 것에 관하여 － 『겨레말큰사전』의 경우

Abstract

It is now almost a common sense that the development of a unified standard ‘national language’ was essential for the construction of a modern nation-state, and what played a key role in the process was the establishment of orthography and the decision of the standard language. It becomes possible to compile a dictionary on the base of the above two matters. In particular, the matters of orthography and the standard language are inseparable from the reading and writing sections. The fact that the orthography deals with only the standard language means that the people who use regional variations are deprived of the right to write publicly in their own language. Of course, it is accepted naturally in a modern nation-state aiming at a ‘uniform monolingual society’. However, such a policy may raise complicated problems for Koreans who are facing the challenge of our time which is the integration of North and South Korea as there is no room for the common sense of ‘peaceful coexistence’ (of North and South Korea recognizing each other) if we pursue ‘linguistic modernity’ (which needs unification by either language as the standard type). This study has reviewed the problems raised by ‘linguistic modernity’ from the viewpoint of the aforementioned ‘uniform monolingual society’ and examined if it will be possible to overcome the problems in relation to the policy on the compilation of Gyeoremal-Keunsajeon which is aiming to integrate the language of North and South Korea.