Aegukka (North Korea)

The story

"Aegukka" means "patriotic song". In Korean the word can name any song of patriotic feeling, official or not, as distinct from a gukka, an official national anthem; in general use it came to stand for the national anthem of North Korea. It is also known by its opening words and as the "Song of a Devotion to a Country". The site's Aegukga is South Korea's anthem, a different song with the same name in another romanization.

The Korean government in exile in Shanghai (1919-1945) had adopted the older "Aegukga", sung to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne", as its anthem. After the Second World War South Korea kept those words with a new tune, while North Korea used them briefly with "Auld Lang Syne" before adopting a newly written song in 1947, with words by Pak Se-yong and music by Kim Won-gyun. It was made as a patriotic song celebrating independence from Japanese occupation.

In the early 1980s Kim Jong Il sought to reduce the song's importance in favour of the "Song of General Kim Il Sung". That song and the "Song of General Kim Jong Il" have since served at home as de facto national anthems, while "Aegukka" is kept for representing North Korea abroad: for visits of foreign dignitaries and for North Korean athletes at international competitions. Unlike most North Korean patriotic songs, it praises neither the Workers' Party of Korea nor the Kim family but Korea as a whole. It opens the broadcast day of the Korean Central Broadcasting Station, the Voice of Korea and Korean Central Television. The full song has two verses; when only the first is performed its last four bars are repeated, and when both are performed the repeat comes at the end of the second.

In 2023 Kim Jong Un announced an end to efforts at reunification with South Korea. In February 2024 the words were changed so that a phrase naming the Korean peninsula, and with it a unified Korean nation, was replaced. At a ceremony on 17 April 2024 for 10,000 new homes in Hwasong District, Pyongyang, the anthem was performed and broadcast on Korean Central Television; in the rebroadcast the next day its title had become "National Anthem of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea", which observers took as a further step in setting the North apart from the South, whose anthem bears the same name. On 25 October 2024 the Standing Committee of the Supreme People's Assembly adopted a law on the national anthem without reporting its content, and the Constitution was amended to give the anthem its new name. Performing the song is prohibited in South Korea under the National Security Act.

What it says

A patriotic anthem in praise of Korea, its land and its people, solemn and celebratory; it names neither the party nor the ruling family.

The words

The words of this song are still in copyright, so they are not printed here. “What it says” above gives their theme in our own words.