Korean is a Koreanic language native to Korea, which makes up the majority of the language's 81 million speakers. It is the official language of both North Korea and South Korea. In the south, the language is known as (), and in the north, it is known as (). Since the turn of the 21st century, Korean popular culture has spread around the world through globalization and cultural exports. Korean uses the Hangul alphabet.
Beyond Korea the language is recognized as a minority language in parts of China, namely Jilin, and specifically Yanbian Prefecture, and Changbai County. It is also spoken by Sakhalin Koreans in parts of Sakhalin, the Russian island just north of Japan, and by the in parts of Central Asia. The Jeju language of Jeju Island is closely related but not mutually intelligible with Korean. Together with a few extinct relatives they form the compact Koreanic language family. The linguistic homeland of Korean is suggested to be somewhere in modern Manchuria. The hierarchy of the society from which the language originates deeply influences the language, leading to a system of speech levels and honorifics indicative of the formality of any given situation.
Modern Korean is written in the Korean script ( in South Korea, in North Korea), an alphabet system developed during the 15th century for that purpose, although it did not become the primary script until the mid 20th century. (Hanja and mixed script were the primary script until then.) The script uses 24 basic letters (jamo) and 27 complex letters formed from the basic ones.
Interest in Korean language acquisition (as a foreign language) has been generated by longstanding alliances, military involvement and diplomacy, such as between South Korea–United States and China–North Korea since the end of World War II and the Korean War. Along with other languages such as the Chinese languages and Arabic, Korean is ranked at the top difficulty level for English speakers by the United States Department of Defense.
History
Modern Korean descends from Middle Korean, which in turn descends from Old Korean, which descends from the Proto-Koreanic language, which is generally suggested to have its linguistic homeland somewhere in Manchuria. Whitman (2012) suggests that the proto-Koreans, already present in northern Korea, expanded into the southern part of the Korean Peninsula in around 300 BC and coexisted with the descendants of the Japonic Mumun cultivators (or assimilated them). Both had influence on each other and a later founder effect diminished the internal variety of both language families.
Since the establishment of two independent governments, North–South differences have developed in standard Korean, including variations in pronunciation and vocabulary chosen. While there tends to be strong political conflict between North and South Korea regarding these linguistic "differences", regional dialects within each country actually display greater linguistic variations than those found between North and South Korean standards. Nevertheless these dialects remain largely mutually intelligible.
Writing systems
The Chinese language, written with Chinese characters and read with Sino-Xenic pronunciations, was introduced to Korea in the 1st century BC and remained the medium of formal writing and government until the late 19th century. Korean scholars adapted Chinese characters (known in Korean as Hanja) to write their own language, creating scripts known as idu, hyangchal, gugyeol and gakpil. These systems were cumbersome owing to the fundamental disparities between the Korean and Chinese languages and accessible only to those educated in classical Chinese. Most of the population was illiterate.
In the 15th century King Sejong the Great personally developed an alphabetic featural writing system, known today as Hangul, to promote literacy among the common people. Introduced in the document , it was called ('colloquial script') and quickly spread nationwide to increase literacy in Korea.
The Korean alphabet was denounced by the aristocracy, who looked down upon it for being too easy to learn. However it gained widespread use among the common class and was widely used to print popular novels, which were enjoyed by the common class. Since few people could understand official documents written in classical Chinese, Korean kings sometimes released public notices written entirely in Hangul as early as the 16th century for all Korean classes, including uneducated peasants and slaves. By the 17th century the had exchanged Hangul letters with slaves, which suggests a high literacy rate of Hangul during the Joseon era.
In the context of growing Korean nationalism in the 19th century the Kabo Reform of 1894 abolished the Confucian examinations and decreed that government documents would be issued in Hangul instead of literary Chinese. Some newspapers were published in Hangul, but other publications used Korean mixed script, with Hanja for Sino-Korean vocabulary and Hangul for other elements. North Korea abolished Hanja in writing in 1949 but continues to teach it in schools. Its usage in South Korea is mainly reserved for specific circumstances such as newspapers, scholarly papers and disambiguation. Today Hanja is largely unused in everyday life but is still important for historical and linguistic studies.
Names The Korean names for the language are based on the names for Korea used in both South Korea and North Korea. The English word "Korean" is derived from Goryeo, which is thought to be the first Korean dynasty known to Western nations. Korean people in the former USSR refer to themselves as or (literally, 'Koryo/Goryeo people'), and call the language . Some older English sources also use the spelling "Corea" to refer to the nation, and its inflected form for the language, culture and people; the "Korea" spelling experienced a sharp rise in popularity during the 1890s, being de facto standardized by 1907.According to Google's NGram English corpus of 2015,
In South Korea the Korean language is referred to by many names including ('Korean language'), ('Korean speech') and ('our language'); "" is taken from the name of the Korean Empire (). The "" () in and is derived from Samhan, in reference to the Three Kingdoms of Korea (not the ancient confederacies in the southern Korean Peninsula), while "" and "" mean "language" and "speech", respectively. Korean is also simply referred to as , literally "national language". This name is based on the same Han characters ( 'nation' + 'language') that are also used in Taiwan and Japan to refer to their respective national languages.
In North Korea and China, the language is most often called , or more formally, . This is taken from the North Korean name for Korea (Joseon), a name retained from the Joseon period until the proclamation of the Korean Empire, which in turn was annexed by the Empire of Japan.
In mainland China, following the establishment of diplomatic relations with South Korea in 1992, the term or the short form Cháoyǔ has normally been used to refer to the standard language of North Korea and Yanbian, whereas Hánguóyǔ or the short form Hányǔ is used to refer to the standard language of South Korea.
Classification
Korean is a member of the Koreanic family along with the Jeju language. Some linguists have included it in the Altaic family, but the core Altaic proposal itself has lost most of its prior support. The Khitan language has several vocabulary items similar to Korean that are not found in other Mongolian or Tungusic languages, suggesting a Korean influence on Khitan.
The hypothesis that Korean could be related to Japanese has had some supporters due to some overlap in vocabulary and similar grammatical features that have been elaborated upon by such researchers as Samuel E. Martin, and Roy Andrew Miller.e.g. , Sergei Starostin (1991) found about 25% of potential cognates in the Japanese–Korean 100-word Swadesh list. Some linguists concerned with the issue between Japanese and Korean, including Alexander Vovin, have argued that the indicated similarities are not due to any genetic relationship, but rather to a sprachbund effect and heavy borrowing, especially from Ancient Korean into Western Old Japanese. A good example might be Middle Korean sàm and Japanese asá, meaning 'hemp'., also found in This word seems to be a cognate, but although it is well attested in Western Old Japanese and Northern Ryukyuan languages, in Eastern Old Japanese it only occurs in compounds, and it is only present in three dialects of the Southern Ryukyuan language group. Also, the doublet wo meaning 'hemp' is attested in Western Old Japanese and Southern Ryukyuan languages. It is thus plausible to assume a borrowed term.
Hudson & Robbeets (2020) suggested that there are traces of a pre-Nivkh substratum in Korean. According to the hypothesis, ancestral varieties of Nivkh (also known as Amuric) were once distributed on the Korean Peninsula before the arrival of Koreanic speakers.
Phonology
] Korean syllable structure is (C)(G)V(C), consisting of an optional onset consonant, glide and final coda surrounding a core vowel.
Consonants BilabialAlveolarAlveolo-palatalVelarGlottalNasal Plosive/Affricateplain or tense or aspirated or Fricative plain or tense or Approximant Liquid or
Assimilation and allophony The IPA symbol () is used to denote the tensed consonants . Its official use in the extensions to the IPA is for "strong" articulation, but is used in the literature for faucalized voice. The Korean consonants also have elements of stiff voice, but it is not yet known how typical this is of faucalized consonants. They are produced with a partially constricted glottis and additional subglottal pressure in addition to tense vocal tract walls, laryngeal lowering, or other expansion of the larynx.
is aspirated and becomes an alveolo-palatal before or for most speakers (but see North–South differences in the Korean language). This occurs with the tense fricative and all the affricates as well. At the end of an utterance, changes to (example: beoseot () 'mushroom').
may become a bilabial before or , a palatal before or , a velar before , a voiced between voiced sounds, and a elsewhere.
become voiced between voiced sounds.
frequently denasalize at the beginnings of words.
becomes alveolar flap between vowels, and or at the end of a syllable or next to another . A written syllable-final '', when followed by a vowel or a glide (i.e., when the next character starts with ''), migrates to the next syllable and thus becomes .
Traditionally, was disallowed at the beginning of a word. It disappeared before , and otherwise became . However, the inflow of western loanwords changed the trend, and now word-initial (mostly from English loanwords) are pronounced as a free variation of either or .
All obstruents (plosives, affricates, fricatives) at the end of a word are pronounced with no audible release, .
Plosive sounds become nasals before nasal sounds.
Hangul spelling does not reflect these assimilatory pronunciation rules, but rather maintains the underlying, partly historical morphology. Given this, it is sometimes hard to tell which actual phonemes are present in a certain word.
The traditional prohibition of word-initial became a morphological rule called "initial law" () in the pronunciation standards of South Korea, which pertains to Sino-Korean vocabulary. Such words retain their word-initial in the pronunciation standards of North Korea. For example, "labor" () – north: (), south: () "history" () – north: (), south: () "female" () – north: (), south: ()
Vowels
The standard Korean monophthongs and their pronunciation principles are as follows: Monophthongs or , , , Vowels preceded by intermediaries,or diphthongs or , , , , , , is closer to a near-open central vowel (), though is still used for tradition.