A shrunk universe : North Korea's "Earthly Paradise"

According to the North Korean authorities, their country is a worker's paradise ruled by beloved and competent leader Kim. In reality, North Korea is a secretive, isolated, heavily militarized and desperately poor country. And it is a wonder that the regime still survives some twenty years after the collapse of the communist bloc but what is most surprising is the behavior of the people, even allowing for their intimidation, that they seem to obey Kim so blindly, and genuinely entrust their fate to him. Like the people of a besieged fortress, they are so afraid of something coming from the outside that they prefer to stick together in their perilous situation. This study is an attempt to understand the state of mind of the people of North Kbrea, and explores the discursive construction of national identity through a systematic analysis of language in school textbooks currently used in North Korea. Using the corpus analysis technique, I have investigated the characteristics of language use in NK textbooks through their comparison with those used in South Korean. To this end, a database was established comprising approximately 300, OOO words from the textbooks of the two groups. I gave a special attention to 5 words "father","we/us","home","enemy" and "world" whose use in NK textbooks was quantitatively and semantically different to SK textbooks. I consider these words as the central axis of linguistic construction (pivotal words) of North Korea's ideal world. I aim to show how the idea of others is crystallized around these 5 pivotal words and how the linguistic construction of national identity is articulated in the dichotomic frame of in and out, us and others, paradise and hell, etc. Of course, the idea of the other is a foundational component in the construction of national identity. This study shows that in the case of North Korea, whereas the frame is sharp, the identity of the other remains blurred, and this acts as an excellent tool for self seclusion and generation of "otherphobia".