Hamgyŏng dialect

Since the nineteenth century, it has also been spoken by Korean diaspora communities in Northeast China and the former Soviet Union.

Characteristic features of Hamgyŏng include a pitch accent closely aligned to Middle Korean tone, extensive palatalization, widespread umlaut, preservation of pre-Middle Korean intervocalic consonants, distinctive verbal suffixes, and an unusual syntactic rule in which negative particles intervene between the auxiliary and the main verb.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in response to poor harvests and the Japanese annexation of Korea, many Koreans, including Hamgyŏng speakers, emigrated from the northern parts of the peninsula to eastern Manchuria (now Northeast China) and the southern part of Primorsky Krai in the Russian Far East.

The descendants of these immigrants to Manchuria continue to speak, read, and write varieties of Korean while living in China, where they enjoy regional autonomy.

[2] In the 1930s, Stalin had the entire Korean population of the Russian Far East, some 250,000 people, forcibly deported to Soviet Central Asia, particularly Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

[7][a] Middle Korean had voiced fricatives /ɣ/, /z/, and /β/, which have disappeared in most modern dialects, but not in Gyeongsang and other southern provinces.

For instance, the Seoul conjunction 하고 ha-ko [hago] "and" is realized as 하그 ha-ku [hagɯ].

In Sino-Korean vocabulary, CjV sequences have merged into umlauted monophthongs which have now become diphthongized again: compare Seoul 교실 kyosil /kjosil/ "classroom" to Hamgyŏng 괴실 koysil /køsil~kwesil/.

Most analyses identify three speech levels of differing formality and deference to the addressee, which are marked by sentence-final verb-ending suffixes, as in other Korean dialects.

[1][17][a] 술기도swulki-tocart-even넘어nem-ecross-INF못moscannot가오ka-ogo-DEC술기도 넘어 못 가오swulki-to nem-e mos ka-ocart-even cross-INF cannot go-DEC'Not even a cart can cross over' [Hamgyŏng]수레도suley-tocart-even못moscannot넘어nem-ecross-INF가오ka-ogo-DEC수레도 못 넘어 가오suley-to mos nem-e ka-ocart-even cannot cross-INF go-DEC'Not even a cart can cross over' [Seoul]Specific vocabulary differences include kinship terminology.

[18] Another example would be the use of (슴)음둥 (sŭm)ŭmdung in the Northeast dialect, as opposed to the standard -습니다 seumnida, or the use of -으 eu instead of -의 ui, 으르 eureu instead of -으로 euro, or -으/르 eu/reu instead of 을/를 eul/reul.