Korean Language Services

Korean (한국어/조선말) 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 People’s Republic of 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 had used Hanja and phonetic systems like Hyangchal, Gugyeol and Idu extensively 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. Some believe it to be distantly related to Japanese-Ryukyuan. The Korean language is agglutinative in its morphology and SOV in its syntax. Korean is the official language of South Korea and North Korea. It is also one of the two official languages of the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in China. In South Korea, the regulatory body for Korean is the Seoul-based National Institute of the Korean Language, which was created by presidential decree on January 23, 1991. In North Korea, the regulatory body is the Sahoe Kwahagwon Ŏhak Yŏnguso. Similarities to other languages > Korean is similar to the Altaic languages in lacking certain grammatical elements, including articles, fusional morphology and relative pronouns. Since Ramstedt’s 1928 article, some linguists support the hypothesis that Korean can be classified as an Altaic language or as a relative of proto-Altaic. However, linguists agree today 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 supporters due to some apparent overlap in vocabulary and similar grammatical features that have been elaborated upon by such researchers as Samuel E. Martin and Roy Andrew Miller. Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin (1991) 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. In Korea, Korean ethnic nationalism and anti-Japanese sentiment has led to widespread dismissal of the idea of Japanese-Korean linguistic connection. A popular myth among Koreans that they are descended from “horse-riding peoples of Central Asia such as the Mongols” has led Korean scholars to continue propagating the Altaic hypothesis, with many western scholars taking a more nuanced view. However, competing theories of the genetic provenance of Korean are less well evidenced. Some linguists, most notably Alexander Vovin, have argued that the indicated similarities between Japanese and Korean are not due to any genetic relationship, but rather to a sprachbund effect and heavy borrowing, especially from ancient Korean into Western Old Japanese. Dialects > Korean has numerous small local dialects. The standard language (pyojuneo or pyojunmal) of both South Korea and North Korea is based on the dialect of the area around Seoul, though the northern standard has been influenced by the dialect of P’yŏngyang. All dialects of Korean are similar to each other and at least partially mutually intelligible, though the dialect of Jeju Island is divergent enough to be sometimes classified as a separate language. One of the more salient differences between dialects is the use of tone: speakers of Seoul dialect make use of vowel length, whereas speakers of the Gyeongsang dialect maintain the pitch accent of Middle Korean. Some dialects are conservative, maintaining Middle Korean sounds (such as z, β, ə) which have been lost from the standard language, whereas others are highly innovative. There are few clear boundaries between Korean dialects, and they are typically partially grouped according to the regions of Korea. Writing system > 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 in 1446. Korean is now written almost exclusively in hangul. While South Korean schools still teach 1,800 hanja, North Korea abolished hanja decades ago.