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] The Korean language is spoken primarily in Korea. Its speakers call it Han'guk'eo(한국어) or Han'gung'mal(한국말).

Classification

Korean, as such, is often classified as being a separate language in a family of its own. Its links, like those of Japanese, to Altaic and proto-Altaic also have been much argued of late. It does have some semblances considering the morphology to some languages of the Eastern Turkic group, namely, Yakutsk and some of its variants.

Alphabet

Han'geul, the Korean alphabet, consists of 24 letters -- 14 consonants and 10 vowels that are written in groups of 2 to 5 characters. Unlike the Chinese writing system and the Japanese Kanji system, Hangul is not an ideographic system. The shapes of the individual Hangul letters were designed to model the physical morphology of the tongue, palate and teeth; up to four letters join to form a syllabic unit.

King Sejong of Korea created the Korean script with the help of his advisors. It initially was not well received by the educated populace, who already used Chinese characters to write Korean. When Japan invaded Korea and banned Korean publications, many Koreans recognized that the Korean script created a stronger cultural language identity and adopted it.

However, the Chinese characters in Korean, the Hanja, are still used to some extent nowadays.

Grammar

Korean grammar is similar to that of the Japanese language. The basic form of a Korean sentence is Subject-Object-Verb (SOV), and modifiers precede the modified word. So whereas in English we would say, "I'm going to the store to buy some food", in Korean it would be something like: *"I food in-order-to-buy to-store am-going."

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

H: "가게에 가세요?"

G: "예."

H: *"store-to are-going?"

G: "yes."

which in English would translate to:

H: "are you going to the store?"

G: "yes."

Unlike European languages, Korean does not conjugate verbs using agreement with the subject. 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/honored persons, another. This loosely echoes the T-V distinction of Spanish and German

External links: Hangul syllables (7MByte PDF) and Jamo

The official language of the Republic of Korea (South Korea) and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea), also spoken by Koreans in China, Japan, Russia, and Central Asia--all in all, by more than 70 million people. Korean has no known affiliation, although it has been theorised that it is a member of the Altaic language family. Possible affinity with Japanese, with which it shares grammatical similarity, has also been discussed more and more of late.

Korean is an agglutinative language, and the common word order is Subject + Object + Verb. A large percentage of its vocabulary has been borrowed from Chinese. To a much lesser extent, words have been also borrowed from Japanese, Mongolian, and Indian languages such as Dravidian. In modern times, many words have also been borrowed from Western languages, chiefly English.

Korean is written in the Korean alphabet Hangeul (Hangul), invented by King Sejong of the Joseon (Choson) dynasty and proclaimed in 1446. Before that, Koreans wrote almost exclusively in Chinese characters. There were some systems developed earlier to use Chinese characters and simplified forms of them to phonetically transcribe Korean, called idu and hyangchal, but for the most part Koreans had to learn literary Chinese to be literate. The use of literary Chinese remained dominant until the end of the Joseon dynasty, and South Koreans still mix Chinese characters in their writing alongside hangeul for Chinese loanwords. North Korea stopped using Chinese characters outright, and the trend in South Korea is to use less and less.

There are several dialect groups of Korean. The standard dialect 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 Pyongyang. These dialects are similar, and in fact all dialects except that of Jeju (Cheju) Island are largely mutually intelligible.