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Korean (한국어/조선말, see below) is the official language of both North and South Korea. The language is also one of the two official languages (the other is Standard Mandarin) in neighbouring Yanbian, China. Worldwide, there are around 80 million Korean speakers, including large groups in the former Soviet Union, China, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, Brazil, Japan, and more recently, South Africa and the Philippines.

The genealogical classification of Korean is debated. Many linguists place it in the Altaic language family; some others consider it to be a language isolate. Korean is agglutinative in its morphology and SOV in its syntax. Like Japanese and Vietnamese, the Korean language borrowed large amounts of morphemes from Chinese, and Sino-Korean words take up a significant portion of the vocabulary. Traditionally, Sino-Korean words were written using Hanja, but since the 20th century, the use of Chinese characters has gradually lost popularity, and Sino-Korean words are now normally written using Hangul. North Korea stopped using Chinese characters in 1949. Usually, only a small amount of Chinese characters can be found in the written language of South Korea.

This article is mainly about the spoken Korean language. See Hangul for details on the native Korean writing system.

Names

The Korean names for the language are based on the names for Korea used in North and South Korea.

In North Korea and Yanbian in China, the language is most often called Chosŏnmal (조선말; with Hanja:朝鮮말), or more formally, Chosŏnŏ (조선어; 朝鮮語).

In South Korea, the language is most often called Hangungmal (한국말; 韓國말), or more formally, Hangugeo (한국어; 韓國語) or Gugeo (국어; 國語; literally "national language"). It is sometimes colloquially called Urimal ("our language"; 우리말 in one word in South Korea, 우리 말 with a space in North Korea).

On the other hand, Korean people in the former USSR, who refer to themselves as Koryo-saram (also Goryeoin ) call the language Goryeomal (고려말; 高麗말).

Classification

The classification of the modern Korean language is uncertain, and due to the lack of any one generally accepted theory, it is sometimes described conservatively as a language isolate.

Since the publication of the article of Ramstedt in 1926, many linguists support the hypothesis that Korean can be classified as an Altaic language, or as a relative of proto-Altaic. Korean is similar to Altaic languages in that they both lack certain grammatical elements, including number, gender, articles, fusional morphology, voice, and relative pronouns (Kim Namkil). Korean especially bears some morphological resemblance to some languages of the Eastern Turkic group, namely Sakha (Yakut). Vinokurova, a scholar of the Sakha language, noted that like in Korean, and unlike in other Turkic languages or a variety of other languages surveyed, adverbs in Sakha are derived from verbs with the help of derivational morphology; however, she did not suggest this implied any relation between the two languages.

It is also considered likely that Korean is related in some way to Japanese, since the two languages have a similar grammatical structure. Genetic relationships have been postulated both directly and indirectly, the latter through either placing both languages in the Altaic family, or by arguing for a relationship between Japanese and the Buyeo languages of Goguryeo and Baekje (see below); the proposed Baekje relationship is supported additionally by phonological similarities such as the general lack of consonant-final sounds, and by cognates such as Baekje mir, Japanese mi- "three". Furthermore, there are known cultural links between Baekje and Japan, it even being likely that the Baekje upper classes fled to Japan when the kingdom fell. Census records from early Japan show that most Japanese aristocratic clans traced their lineage to the Korean peninsula. A fact confirmed by the current Japanese Emperor in a speech marking his 68th birthday when he stated, "I, on my part, feel a certain kinship with Korea, given the fact that it is recorded in the Chronicles of Japan that the mother of Emperor Kammu was of the line of King Muryong of Paekche," and "I believe it was fortunate to see such culture and skills transmitted from Korea to Japan."

Others argue, however, that the similarities are not due to any genetic relationship, but rather to a sprachbund effect. See East Asian languages for morphological features shared among languages of the East Asian sprachbund, and Japanese language classification for further details on the possible relationship.

Of the ancient languages attested in the Korean Peninsula, modern Korean is believed to be a descendent of the languages of Samhan and Silla; it is unknown whether these are related to the Buyeo languages, though many Korean scholars believe they were mutually intelligible, and the collective basis of what in the Goryeo period would merge to become Middle Korean (the language before the changes that the Seven-Year War brought) and eventually Modern Korean. The Jeju dialect preserves some archaic features that can also be found in Middle Korean, whose arae a is retained in the dialect as a distinct vowel.

There are also fringe theories proposing various other relationships; for example, a few linguists such as Homer B. Hulbert have also tried to relate Korean to the Dravidian languages through the similar syntax in both.

Dialects

Korean has several dialects (called mal , bang-eon, or saturi in Korean). 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'yŏngyang. These dialects are similar, and are in fact all mutually intelligible, except the dialect of Jeju Island (see Jeju Dialect). The dialect spoken in Jeju is classified as a different language by some Korean linguists. One of the most notable differences between dialects is the use of stress: speakers of Seoul dialect use stress very little, and standard South Korean has a very flat intonation; on the other hand, speakers of Gyeongsang dialect have a very pronounced intonation.

It is also worth noting that 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, such as South Jeolla dialect /kur/ vs. Standard Korean /ip/ "mouth" or Gyeongsang dialect /ʨʌŋ.gu.ʥi/ vs. Standard Korean /puːʨʰu/ "garlic chives." This suggests that the Korean Peninsula may have at one time been much more linguistically diverse than it is at present. See also the Buyeo languages hypothesis.

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. Here is a list of traditional dialect names and locations:

Sounds

Consonants

Example words for consonants:

The IPA symbol <͈> (a subscript double straight quotation mark) is used to denote the tensed consonants /p͈, t͈, k͈͈, ʨ͈, s͈/. Its official use in the Extended 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.

Sometimes the tense consonants are indicated with the apostrophe-like symbol <ʼ>, but this is inappropriate, as IPA <ʼ> represents the ejective consonants, with their piston-like upward glottal movement and non-pulmonic air pressure, which the Korean tense consonants do not share.

Vowels

Monophthongs

Korean has 8 different vowel qualities and a length distinction. Two more vowels, the close-mid front rounded vowel /ø/ and the close front rounded vowel /y/, can still be heard in the speech of some older speakers, but they have been largely replaced by the diphthongs and respectively. In a 2003 survey of 350 speakers from Seoul, nearly 90% pronounced the vowel 'ㅟ' as . Length distinction is almost completely lost; length distinction for all vowels can still be heard from older speakers, but almost all younger speakers either do not distinguish length consistently or do not distinguish it at all. The distinction between /e/ and /ɛ/ is another decreasing element in the speech of some younger speakers, mostly in the area of Seoul, whereas in other dialectal areas the two vowels can be distinctly heard. For those speakers who do not make the difference seems to be the dominant form. Long /ʌː/ is actually for most speakers.

Diphthongs and glides

/j/ and /w/ are considered to be components of diphthongs rather than separate consonant phonemes.

Source: Handbook of the International Phonetic Association

Phonology

/s/ becomes an alveolo-palatal before or for most speakers (but see #Differences in the language between North Korea and South Korea). This occurs with the tense fricative and all the affricates as well. At the end of a syllable, /s/ changes to /t/ (Example: beoseot (버섯) 'mushroom').

/h/ becomes a bilabial before or , a palatal before or , a velar before , a voiced between voiced sounds, and a elsewhere.

/p, t, ʨ, k/ become voiced between voiced sounds.

/l/ becomes alveolar flap between vowels, or at the end of a syllable or next to another /l/, disappears at the beginning of a word before in normal speech, and otherwise becomes in normal speech.

All obstruents (plosives, affricates, fricatives) are unreleased at the end of a word.

Plosive stops /p, t, k/ become nasal stops before nasal stops.

Some of these phonetic assimilation rules can be seen in the following:

• /ʨoŋlo/ is pronounced as
• /hankukmal/ as

Hangul spelling does not reflect these assimilatory pronunciation rules, but rather maintains the underlying morphology.

One difference between the pronunciation standards of North and South Korea is the treatment of initial , and initial before or . For example,

• "labour" - north: rodong (로동), south: nodong (노동)
• "history" - north: ryŏksa (력사), south: yeoksa (역사)
• "female" - north: nyŏja (녀자), south: yeoja (여자)

Phonotactics

Korean syllables may not start or end with consonant clusters, except in a few cases. Consequently, consonant clusters in Korean are usually limited to clusters of two consonants where two syllables have been joined.

Only seven consonant allophones are found at the end of syllables: and . Syllable-final stops are all unreleased.

Vowel harmony

Traditionally, the Korean language has had strong vowel harmony; that is, in pre-modern Korean, as in most Altaic languages, not only did the inflectional and derivational affixes (such as postpositions) change in accordance to the main root vowel, but native words also adhered to vowel harmony. It is not as prevalent in modern usage, although it remains strong in onomatopoeia, adjectives and adverbs, interjections, and conjugation. There are also other traces of vowel harmony in Korean.

There are three classes of vowels in Korean: positive, negative, and neutral. The vowel eu is considered partially a neutral and negative vowel. The vowel classes loosely follow the negative and positive vowels; they also follow orthography. Exchanging positive vowels with negative vowels usually creates different nuances of meaning, with positive vowels sounding diminutive and negative vowels sounding crude.

Some examples:

• Onomatopoeia:
  • 퐁당퐁당 (pongdangpongdang) and 풍덩풍덩 (pungdeongpungdeong), light and heavy water splashing
• Emphasised Adjectives:
  • 노랗다 (norata) means plain yellow, while its negative, 누렇다 (nureota) means very yellow
  • 파랗다 (parata) means plain blue, while its negative, 퍼렇다 (peoreota) means deep blue
• Particles at the end of verbs:
  • 잡다 (japda) (to catch) → 잡았다 (Jabatda) (caught)
  • 접다 (jeopda) (to fold) → 접었다 (Jeobeotda) (folded)
• Interjections:
  • 아이고 (aigo) and 어이구 (eoigu) meaning "oh!"
  • 아하 (aha) and 어허 (eoheo) meaning "indeed" and "well" respectively

Grammar

Korean is an agglutinative language. The basic form of a Korean sentence is Subject-Object-Verb (SOV), and modifiers precede the modified word. As a side note, a sentence can break the SOV word order, however, it must end with the verb. The following is an example of contrast between the Korean and English word order. In English, one would say, "I'm going to the store to buy some food." But in Korean the sentence would be: *"I food to-buy in-order-to store-to going-am."

In Korean, "unnecessary" words (see theme and rheme) can be left out of a sentence as long as the context makes the meaning clear. A typical exchange might translate word-for word to the following:

H: "가게에 가세요?" (gage-e gaseyo?)

G: "네." (ne.)

H: *"store-to going?"

G: "yes."

which in English would translate to:

H: "Going to the store?"

G: "Yes."

Unlike most European languages, Korean does not conjugate verbs using agreement with the subject, and nouns have no gender. Instead, verb conjugations depend upon the verb tense and on the relation between the people speaking. When talking to or about friends, you would use one conjugate ending, to your parents, another, and to nobility/honoured persons, another. This loosely echoes the T-V distinction of most Indo-European languages.

Speech levels and honorifics

The relationship between a speaker or writer and his or her subject and audience is paramount in Korean, and the grammar reflects this. The relationship between speaker/writer and subject referent is reflected in honorifics, while that between speaker/writer and audience is reflected in speech level.

Honorifics

When talking about someone superior in status, a speaker or writer usually uses special nouns or verb endings to indicate the subject's superiority. Generally, someone is superior in status if he/she is an older relative, a stranger of roughly equal or greater age, or an employer, teacher, customer, or the like. Someone is equal or inferior in status if he/she is a younger stranger, student, employee or the like. On rare occasions (like when someone wants to pick a fight), a speaker might speak to a superior or stranger in a way normally only used for, say, animals, but it would be foolhardy to do so without first seriously considering the consequences to one's physical safety.

Speech levels

There are no fewer than 7 verb paradigms or speech levels in Korean, and each level has its own unique set of verb endings which are used to indicate the level of formality of a situation. Unlike "honorifics" — which are used to show respect towards the referent of a subject — speech levels are used to show respect towards a speaker's or writer's audience. The names of the 7 levels are derived from the non-honorific imperative form of the verb 하다 (hada, "do") in each level, plus the suffix 체 ('che', Hanja: 體), which means "style."

The highest 5 levels use final verb endings and are generally grouped together as jondaemal (존대말), while the lowest 2 levels (해요체 haeyoche and 해체 haeche) use non-final endings and are called 반말 (banmal, "half-words") in Korean. (The haeyoche in turn is formed by simply adding the non-final ending -요 (-yo) to the haeche form of the verb.)

Vocabulary

The core of the Korean vocabulary is made up of native Korean words. More than 50% of the vocabulary (up to 70% by some estimates), however, especially scholarly terminology, are Sino-Korean words, either

• directly borrowed from Chinese written language, or
• coined in Japan or Korea using Chinese characters.

Korean has two number systems: one native, and one borrowed from the Chinese.

To a much lesser extent, words have also occasionally been borrowed from Mongolian, Sanskrit, and other languages. Conversely, the Korean language itself has also contributed some loanwords to other languages, most notably the Tsushima dialect of Japanese.

In modern times, many words have been borrowed from Japanese and Western languages such as German (areubaiteu ‘part-time job’, allereugi ‘allergy’) and more recently English. Concerning daily usage vocabulary except what can be written in hanja, more words have possibly been borrowed from English than from any other language. Some Western words were borrowed indirectly via Japanese, taking a Japanese sound pattern, for example ‘dozen’ > ダース dāsu > 다스 daseu. Most indirect Western borrowings are now written according to current hangulization rules for the respective Western language, as if borrowed directly. There are a few more complicated borrowings such as ‘German(y)’ (see Names for Germany), the first part of whose endonym the Japanese approximated using the Kanji 獨逸 doitsu that were then accepted into the Korean language by their Sino-Korean pronunciation: 獨 dok + 逸 il = Dogil. In South Korean official use, a number of other Sino-Korean country names have been replaced with phonetically oriented hangulizations of the countries' endonyms or English names.

North Korean vocabulary shows a tendency to prefer native Korean over Sino-Korean or foreign borrowings. By contrast, South Korean may have several Sino-Korean or foreign borrowings which tend to be absent in North Korean.

Writing system

In ancient times, the languages of the Korean peninsula were written using Chinese characters, using hyangchal or idu. Knowledge of such systems were lost, and the Korean language was not written at all; the aristocracy used Classical Chinese for its writing.

Korean is now mainly written in Hangul, the Korean alphabet, optionally mixing in Hanja to write Sino-Korean words. South Korea still teaches 1800 Hanja characters in its schools, while the North abolished the use of hanja decades ago.

Hangul consists of 24 letters — 14 consonants and 10 vowels that are written in syllabic blocks of two to five components. Unlike the Chinese writing system (including Japanese Kanji), Hangul is not a logographic system.

Below is a chart of the Korean alphabet's symbols and their canonical IPA values:

Modern Korean is written with spaces between words, a feature not found in Chinese and Japanese. Korean punctuation marks are almost identical to Western ones. Traditionally, Korean was written in columns from top to bottom, right to left, but is now usually written in rows from left to right, top to bottom.

Differences between North Korea and South Korea

The Korean language used in the North and the South exhibits differences in pronunciation, spelling, grammar and vocabulary.

Pronunciation

In North Korea, palatalization of /si/ is optional, and /ʨ/ can be pronounced as in between vowels.

Words that are written the same way may be pronounced differently, such as the examples below. The pronunciations below are given in Revised Romanization, McCune-Reischauer and Hangul, the last of which represents what the Hangul would be if one writes the word as pronounced.

* Similar pronunciation is used in the North whenever the hanja "的" is attached to a Sino-Korean word ending in ㄴ, ㅁ or ㅇ. (In the South, this rule only applies when it is attached to any single-character Sino-Korean word.)

Spelling

Some words are spelt differently by the North and the South, but the pronunciations are the same.

Spelling and pronunciation

Some words have different spellings and pronunciations in the North and the South, some of which were given in the "Phonology" section above:

In general, when transcribing place names, North Korea tends to use the pronunciation in the original language more than South Korea, which often uses the pronunciation in English. For example:

Grammar

Some grammatical constructions are also different:

Vocabulary

Some vocabulary is different between the North and the South:

Others

In the North, 《 and 》 are the symbols used for quotes; in the South, quotation marks equivalent to the English ones, “ and ”, are standard, although 『 』 and 「 」 are sometimes used in popular novels.

See also

• Hangul
• Common phrases in Korean
• Korean romanization
  • Revised romanization of Korean
  • McCune-Reischauer
  • Yale Romanization#Korean
  • SKATS
• Korean numerals
• Korean count word
• Korean language and computers
• List of English words of Korean origin
• Altaic hypothesis
• List of Korea-related topics
• Korean profanity

References

1. Vinokurova, Nadya (1999-04-08). "The Typology of Adverbial Agreement" (Microsoft Word). Retrieved 2007-01-15. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
2. Kanno, Hiroomi (ed.) / Society for Korean Linguistics in Japan (1987). Chōsengo o manabō (『朝鮮語を学ぼう』), Sanshūsha, Tokyo. ISBN 4-384-01506-2

Bliblography

• Sohn, H.-M. (1999). The Korean Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Song, J.J. (2005).The Korean Language: Structure, Use and Context. London: Routledge.

External links

• Korean language overview
• Ethnologue report for Korean
• Ministry of Education's KOSNET
• KOREAN through ENGLISH at Ministry of Culture and Tourism
• Linguistic map of Korea
• Comparison of South and North Korean vocabulary
• Beginners Guide
• Korean Language Guide

• Agglutinative languages
• Language isolates
• Korean language
• Languages of China
• Languages of Korea
• Languages of North Korea
• Altaic languages