This essay is an abbreviated and revised version of ‘Jejueo: Korea’s Other Language,’ which was published as chapter 25 in The Cambridge Handbook of Korean Linguistics, edited by Sungdai Cho & John Whitman and published in 2022. [Essay last updated in October, 2024] A SKETCH GRAMMAR OF JEJUEO * William O’Grady Sejung Yang Changyong Yang University of Hawai‘i at Manoa Jeju National University Jeju National University 1 Introduction For well over 500 years, visitors to Jeju Island have been remarking on the uniqueness of the island’s traditional form of speech. 1 A particularly intriguing early report came from Kim Jeong, the author of Jeju Pungtolok ‘The Topography of Jeju Island,’ who spent 14 months on the island, beginning in 1520. He observed that the island’s speech was so difficult to understand that he had to learn it “like a child learning a barbarian language.” Kim Sangheon, an emissary of the Seoul government who spent six months on Jeju Island in 1601, was so puzzled by the language that he described it in his travelogue Namsalok as being like the “sound of a bird.” The same comparison was made a century later by Lee Hyeongsang, the author of Namhwanbagmul ‘The Encyclopedia of Jeju,’ who went on to add that he needed the assistance of a translator during his stay on the island. Observations of this sort continue to this day. Reports such as these point to an obvious conclusion: the traditional language of Jeju Island is not Korean. Indeed, there has been growing acceptance of this possibility on Jeju Island itself, where the provincial government chose to use the name Jejueo (literally ‘Jeju language’ [ISO 639-3 jje]) in its 2007 Language Act, pushing to the side more traditional appellations such as Jeju satuli ‘Jeju dialect’ and Jeju bangeon ‘Jeju regional speech.’ 2 Although Korean is uncontestably the national language of modern Korea, it is not the only language in the country. A second indigenous language, Jejueo, has been spoken on Jeju Island for centuries and deserves to have its place in the linguistic mosaic of Korea recognized. The next several sections of this chapter will summarize various features of the phonology, morphophonology and morphosyntax of Jejueo, drawing heavily on the much more detailed discussion in Yang, Yang and O’Grady (2020). Jejueo and Korean are quite closely related, and there are many very evident similarities in their vocabulary and grammar. The words o-ta ‘come,’ ka-ta ‘go,’ mek-ta ‘eat,’ pam ‘night’ and pi ‘rain’ are identical in the two languages, as are the case markers -i and -ul, among numerous other items. But there are many major differences too: nang versus namwu for ‘tree,’ sangkoci versus mwucikay for ‘rainbow,’ kop-ta versus swum-ta for ‘hide,’ -eoms versus ko-iss-ta to indicate progressive aspect, -eukh versus -keyss to express intention and conjecture, and so on. A mixture of similarities and differences also characterizes French and Picard, Spanish and Catalan, Dutch and Frisian, and countless other pairs of related languages around the world. Yet none of these languages is a dialect of the other. Mutual intelligibility, not the number of related words or morphemes, is the decisive factor, which should be borne in mind as we proceed. * This work was supported by the Core University Program for Korean Studies through the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the Korean Studies Promotion Service of the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2015-OLU-2250005). We also thank Mi-Soon Byeon, Seongsu Hur and Miho Choo for their valuable assistance and feedback. 1 Jeju Pungtolok, published in 1552, is currently housed in the National Library of Korea; Namsalok, published in 1669, is held in the library of Seoul National University; Namhwanbagmul, published in 1704, is in private hands. 2 Although we use Yale Romanization for linguistic examples, Revised Romanization is employed for proper names, including the name Jeju.