Comedian Kim Si-deok defends Lisn member Won-i amid dialect controversy

Amid a controversy over whether a dialect expression used by Won-i, a member of girl group Lisn, constitutes slang associated with the far-right online community Ilbe, comedian Kim Si-deok — himself from the Gyeongsang region — stepped forward to defend her Saturday, following similar remarks from politicians.

Kim posted a lengthy message on social media. "Why is the world so 'museopno' (scary)?" he wrote, using the dialect form at the center of the dispute. "I grew up in Gyeongsang Province and used the dialect without a second thought, but once I started making a living from it, I looked into a great many books and materials on regional speech."

Kim, who is from Ulsan, previously won wide affection for his Gyeongsang dialect performances on "Park Jun-hyeong's Lifestyle Saturi," a popular segment of KBS2's comedy program "Gag Concert."

"The word 'museopno' that Lisn's Won-i used is a standard interrogative ending in the dialect," Kim said. "For some time now, there have been people who label anyone using the '-no' ending as an Ilbe user, so I've been firing back with 'meorano,' 'waikano' and 'it's not Ilbe.'"

He went on to explain the regional diversity within Gyeongsang dialects. "If you look closely, even the phrase for 'is it there? is it not?' differs: North Gyeongsang Province uses 'innikkyeo? eopnikkyeo?' while South Gyeongsang uses 'isseuye? eopsuye?'" he wrote. "Go deeper and you find differences even among the major cities of Busan, Ulsan and Daegu, and further still, the smaller cities of Masan, Changwon and Jinhae each have their own distinct forms. On top of that, the dialect spoken by older generations differs from what younger people use today."

Kim added that regional dialects are a precious part of Korean cultural heritage, even as vocabulary fades and only intonation and some sentence-ending forms survive.

"A young singer today is using dialect forms common among people in their 50s and 60s, and someone even younger is trying to brand that as Ilbe — that's just completely wrong," Kim said.

The controversy began after a video titled "Minami's True Self" appeared on Won-i's YouTube channel. In the video, Won-i was touring fellow Lisn member Minami's home when a producer said "museopno" — a Gyeongsang dialect expression meaning "scary, isn't it?" — and Won-i echoed it, saying, "Museopno. The lighting alone is scary."

Posts criticizing the expression soon spread online, fueling a debate over whether speech ending in "-no" is a hate-laden Ilbe expression or simply a Gyeongsang dialect form.

Politicians also weighed in. Cho Kuk, former leader of the Rebuilding Korea Party, wrote on social media that, in his observation, Ilbe users mechanically attach "-no" to standard Korean words, while in actual Yeongnam speech the endings "-na" and "-no" are used distinctly.

Lee Jun-seok, leader of the Reform Party, criticized the attempt to "verify someone's ideology based on a single word ending." He said that even after linguists explained that "-no" is used in southeastern dialects not only for questions but also for exclamations and soliloquy, the stigmatizing had not stopped.