Korean Audio & Video Translation Services

Korean (한국어/조선말) is the official language of both South Korea and North Korea, as well as one of the two official languages in China’s Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture. About 80 million people speak Korean worldwide. For over a millennium, Koreans wrote with adapted Chinese characters called hanja, complemented by phonetic systems like hyangchal, gugyeol, and idu. In the 15th century, Sejong the Great commissioned a national writing system called Hangul, but it only came into widespread use in the 20th century, because of the yangban aristocracy’s preference for hanja. Historical linguists classify Korean as a language isolate. The idea that Korean belongs to a putative Altaic language family has been generally discredited. The Korean language is agglutinative in its morphology and SOV in its syntax. The Korean names for the language are based on the names for Korea used in North and South Korea. In South Korea, the language is most often called Hangungmal (한국말), consisting of Hanguk (한국,/hɐːnguk̚/), the South Korean name for Korea, and mal (말,/mal/), meaning “speech”; the /k̚/ at the end of the first word becomes /ŋ/ by the rules of consonant assimilation in Korean phonology. More formally, it may also be called Hangugeo (한국어) or Gugeo (국어; literally “national language”). In North Korea and Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in China, the language is most often called Chosŏnmal (조선말), or more formally, Chosŏnŏ (조선어). The English word “Korean” is derived from Goryeo (고려), which is thought to be the first dynasty known to Western countries. Korean people in the former USSR, who refer to themselves as Koryo-saram call the language Koryo-mar (고려말). In mainland China, following the establishment of diplomatic relations with South Korea in 1992, the term Cháoxiǎnyǔ (朝鲜语 or the short form: Cháoyǔ (朝语)) has normally been used to refer to the standard language of North Korea and Yanbian, whereas Hánguóyǔ (韩国语 or the short form: Hányǔ (韩语)) is used to refer to the standard language of South Korea. Some older English sources also use the spelling “Corean” to refer to the language, country, and people. Formerly, the languages of the Korean peninsula were written using hanja, called hyangchal or idu: the use of Chinese characters either as rebuses to stand for Korean words, or as synonyms for those words. Writing was confined to the ruling elite, who most often wrote only in Classical Chinese. Sejong the Great promulgated the Korean alphabet, hangul, in 1446. Korean is now written almost exclusively in hangul, which is sometimes combined with hanja in South Korea. South Korean high schools still teach 1,800 hanja, while North Korea abolished hanja after 1948.