Hamgyŏng dialect

The Northeast Dialect, sometimes called the Hamgyong Dialect (Korean: 함경 방언), is a dialect of the Korean language used in most of North and South Hamgyŏng and Ryanggang provinces of northeastern North Korea, all of which were originally united as Hamgyŏng Province. 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.