COMMUNITY
40 Gwangju Abroad
Reconnecting with Gwangju Through Saturi
www.gwangjunewsgic.com
July 2021
By Ashley Kim
I
n 2007, I emigrated from Gwangju to a mostly white suburb in southern California. I was seven at the time, and not understanding a word of class for a few months left me with a distinct fear of the English language. This fear developed into an obsession over how I spoke – the pronunciation, grammar, and tone all had to indicate intellect. It was as if slurring a consonant or breaking a subject–verb agreement took me back to my mute, confused self in the early days of my American life. I lost my Korean accent soon enough but also the joy of relaxed speech. My tense relationship with language began to thaw in the summer of 2018, when I visited my relatives in Gwangju before heading off to college. During this trip, I noticed the way people in the city spoke – the Jeolla regional
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dialect, or saturi (사투리). My mother’s Jeolla saturi, which she never uses with me, returned the moment she was reunited with her parents and siblings. If you do not have family from Jeolla-do, you can hear this saturi best in the women working in restaurants or in taxi drivers – especially when they get frustrated with traffic. Like all saturi, it assumes a casual and familiar atmosphere, as if you expect the listener to understand you immediately. The Seoul-based standard Korean (표준어), on the other hand, sounds more formal and impersonal. I cannot quite pin down how the Jeolla dialect sounds, but there is a distinct cadence and pattern of emphasis. Most of the time, it sounds playful, but it can also be quite charismatic. Dragging out an -ing (-잉) at the end of a sentence, for example, can transform an insult into a friendly jab.
2021-06-24 �� 10:19:58
