This sketch of Soviet Korean dialects, brief as it is, should give some flavor of the essence of a rare (and dying) form of North Hamkyeng Korean. Anybody equip

This sketch of Soviet Korean dialects, brief as it is, should give some flavor of the essence of a rare (and dying) form of North Hamkyeng Korean. Anybody equipped with a moderate knowledge of Seoul Standard should see immediately the significant differences between Seoul speech and Soviet Korean, and those with a moderate knowledge of Middle Korean will also see the many direct similarities between 15th- and 16th-century Korean and these data. All in all, the impression is of significant divergence. However, more often than not, the locus of "radical change" has been Seoul Standard and not Soviet Korean: in language change it is usually the center, and not the periphery, that changes "the fastest and the mostest".