Through analyzing several texts on language policy and reforms in North and South Korea, as well as each states views on language and identity and pride, this paper hopes to show the differences in the languages of each state will make reunification between the two Koreas challenging. Over a span of 44 years North Korea managed to coin over 5,000 new lexical terms replacing Chinese characters, while South Korean adopted about 10,000 English-based loanwords. Each language looks at the other differently rather than as one whole language. Introduction There are many factors that play into the bigger of picture of reunification, like the economy, ideologies, religion, and language. The aim of this paper is to show how linguistic divergence makes reunification challenging. To do so, this paper will will investigate texts on language policy, reunification, and loanwords. Reunification is the hope that Korea will become one again, but based on documents like Kings work, similar to many other things, like ideology and actual location, North and South Korea went in opposite directions in terms of language policy and its results. North Korea successfully creating a pure native Korean which is referred to as chos?nmal, while the South adopts loanwords. However, like in North Korea, there are intellectuals that want to completely purify the language. Also mentioned in Kings, han’g?l is under attack from English and is a “victim” and “infected” by foreign influence. North Korean see their as chos?nmal superior over han’g?l, because of their high sense of nationalism because of the chuch’e idea that they live by. Literature review Language and national identity in Asia: North and South Korea. King starts the section with the root of the problem, the Japanese. The colonial period and all of the restriction that the Japanese put on the use of han’g?l, but after the Japanese we defeated in WWII, the Korean Language went into overdrive later going by the Han’g?l Society. During the Japanese colonial period the Korean language had no official status in it's own land Korean citizens had not formal education in their own native tongue, knowledge of and education Japanese was pursued aggressively by the colonial authorities and pursued as aggressively by many Koreans, with the result that by 1945 a significant proportion of the population would be bilingual in Japanese to a certain extent, the Korean Language Society's efforts to define “standard Korean” were never official policy under the Japanese, and Japanese policies during the colonial period can be characterized as having as their main goal the extirpation of culture and language and assimilation to Japanese culture [208]. There is still bitterness towards Japan because of those reasons. After the liberation of the Korea, there was the occupation of the north and south by the USSR and the USA, but there was also a high percentages of illiteracy. This is because rather than learning their own language they we forced to learn Japanese and when the Japanese left, they wouldn't speak the language of their oppressors. However they didn't really know their own language, so the north set up nearly 10,000 schools of “national writing” to battle illiteracy [210]. The north started the Language Policy in February 1947 with the People's Committee saying: Today, as we stand on the road of construction of an independent, self-reliant, democratic state, the unification and development of Korean language and literature based on scientific ideals and continuous research are the basis for refining the cultural construction of the Korean people and are a matter of urgent demand. (R. King 211) North Koreans looked seriously at language reforms because they believed that their language defined them as a nation. However they did continue to study Chinese because they knew that in South Korea they were still using Chinese characters in their publication and they wanted to be able to read what they were saying in the south. In South Korea, the question of rid of Chinese character was in question because they were still occupied by the US who relied heavily on the Japanese-educated elite and officialdom, all of whom were educated in Chinese characters [215]. While the North Koreans were working to purify their state of foreign influence, South Korea still had foreign influences win their state which were in turn influencing the decisions on language. There was a lot o