Korean Language

Korean Language, language spoken by at least 62 million inhabitants of North and South Korea, as well as by some 670,000 Koreans resident in Japan and 1.9 million in China. The origin of Korean is the subject of much linguistic debate and remains uncertain, so at present it is classed as a language isolate. It shares certain characteristics with Japanese and the Altaic languages (for example, it has no articles and does not mark gender), however, while the majority believe Korean and Japanese to be related and to have distant links with Altaic, others suggest links with the Dravidian family or Austronesian languages and no conclusive link has yet been proven.

Ancient Korean, written in Chinese characters, has been preserved in texts of songs from c. 57 bc-ad 935. There is little documentation of the language prior to the mid-15th century when the native Korean alphabet was introduced. Modern standard Korean, promoted since the 1930s, is based on a dialect spoken in Seoul and is written in a native Korean alphabet, called han’gul, or onmun, which was introduced in 1446. Before that time, Korean was written exclusively in Chinese characters. In South Korea, Korean is officially written in the Roman script but also in a mixed script that uses the original Chinese characters for Chinese loanwords. Chinese has had a major influence on the Korean vocabulary, contributing over half of its words.

Korean has a subject-object-verb word order, although this is flexible under certain conditions. Characteristic of Korean grammar is a system of honorifics—endings and internal word markings that reflect established social relationships; word forms change depending on the speaker, the person spoken to (a stranger or older person, a child, a friend), and the person spoken about.

Selected statistical data from Ethnologue: Languages of the World, SIL International.