A local civic group announced Wednesday that civic groups from South and North Korea plan to jointly produce a dictionary in 2009 to promote mutual understanding of each other's version of the Korean language.

The book will be the first such dictionary published by the two Koreas.

Officials for the South Korean organization, Preparing For One Korea, said that the reference work is aimed at containing words from dialects from both South and North Korea, whose linguistic differences widened after the division of the nation in 1945.

The gap between the South and North Korean languages has grown since the two countries started using different dialects as their standard language.

The communist North set its new standard language in 1966 based on the dialect of Pyongyang, its capital, and the dialect used by then-North Korean leader Kim Il-sung. The South continued to use the regional dialect of Seoul as its linguistic standard.

Although the people of the two Koreas can communicate with each other, a growing number of words have come to hold different meanings, reflecting the half-century separation.