이중언어/다언어상황과 조선어 시쓰기의 문제 - 윤동주 시를 중심으로 -

Abstract

This paper aims to examine the meaning behind Dong-Joo Yoon’s poem writing in Korean language. With consistently being exposed to the situation of diglossia and heteroglossia during his lifetime, Yoon was born in Myeon-Dong Bukgando during the period of Republic of China and moved around the different areas; from Manchuko (Yong-Jeong, Gando) to Colonial Joseon (Pyeong-Yang and Gyeong-Seong), and to Imperial Japan. His wandering around three countries affected his language, which was imbalanced, and more specifically two or three languages were hierarchically blended in his language – diglossia and heteroglossia. In detail, this linguistic circumstance, which prevailed during his lifetime, was that three languages – Korean, Japanese, and Chinese – consistently competed against and mutually influenced on each other. This concoction was closely related to immigrant situation, imperial- boundary affairs, and empire-colonial interrelation. It is natural that Yoon considered Korean his mother tongue and it was unchangeable condition under the aforementioned situation of diglossia and heteroglossia. However, rather than restricted to his native language, he experienced the process of objectification through which to some degree he set himself apart from his mother tongue. Hence, his poetry words wandered around one language to another; native and non-native language, standard language and dialect, sound and meaning, Hangeul and Chinese character, and among the different Chinese character used in China, Japan and Korea. In this sense, his poems reveal the conflict and competence among the various languages during the colonial time. His native language was based on Yukjin dialect and it constructed the diaglossic and heteroglossic reality for him. With the linguistic minority and Korean language of peripheral nature, it is believed that he sought the possibility of literary usage of Korean by focusing on ‘the nowness’ of it. He tried to demonstrate the nowness by actively recognizing the imaginary and ethnicized space where a majority of Koreans interacted and communicated with their mother tongue even under the dominance of Gokugo(國語, Imperial Japanese). In addition, he also struggled to disclose the nowness of Korean language on which the dominant perspective was the ‘low-quality’ and ‘minority’ language. In fact, in his literary works, he presented the textual aspect of modern poems and the system of written language showing in Korean, while the colloquial Korean was sub-categorized as a minority language. His poem writing, which is based on the boundary aspect of Colonial Joseon, can be considered the linguistic performance by minority group. As a result, it is in this sense that his poems can be recognized as the resistance and reaction against the conquering power and its ideology, which eventually bring forward crevice on the colonial society.