Online Language Lessons & Language Training

Korean is the official language of Korea, both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide.

In the 15th century a national writing system was commissioned by Sejong the Great, the system being currently called Hangul. Prior to the development of Hangul, Koreans used Hanja (Chinese characters) to write for over a millennium. The genealogical classification of the Korean language is debated by a small number of linguists. Most classify it as a language isolate, while a few consider it to be in the Altaic language family. Others believe it to be distantly related to Japanese-Ryukyuan.

Some linguists support the hypothesis that Korean can be classified as an Altaic language or as a relative of proto-Altaic. Korean is similar to the Altaic languages in that they both lack certain grammatical elements, including articles, fusional morphology and relative pronouns.

However, linguists agree today on the fact that typological resemblances cannot be used to prove genetic relatedness of languages as these features are typologically connected and easily borrowed. Such factors of typological divergence as Middle Mongolian's exhibition of gender agreement can be used to argue that a genetic relationship is unlikely.

The hypothesis that Korean might be related to Japanese has had some more supporters due to some considerable overlap in vocabulary and similar grammatical features. Linguists have found about 25% of potential cognates in the Japanese-Korean 100-word Swadesh list, which - if valid - would place these two languages closer together than other possible members of the Altaic family.

Other linguists argue however, that the similarities are not due to any genetic relationship, but rather to a sprachbund effect and heavy borrowing especially from Korean into Western Old Japanese.

Korean has several dialects. The standard language (pyojuneo or pyojunmal) of South Korea is based on the dialect of the area around Seoul, and the standard for North Korea is based on the dialect spoken around P'yongyang. All dialects of Korean are similar to each other, and are in fact all mutually intelligible.

One of the most notable differences between dialects is the use of stress: speakers of Seoul dialect use very little stress, and standard South Korean has a very flat intonation; on the other hand, speakers of the Gyeongsang dialect have a very pronounced intonation.

There is substantial evidence for a history of extensive dialect levelling, or even convergent evolution or intermixture of two or more originally distinct linguistic stocks, within the Korean language and its dialects. Many Korean dialects have basic vocabulary that is etymologically distinct from vocabulary of identical meaning in Standard Korean or other dialects.

This suggests that the Korean Peninsula may have at one time been much more linguistically diverse than it is at present. There is a very close connection between the dialects of Korean and the regions of Korea, since the boundaries of both are largely determined by mountains and seas.