Korean
Language · official in 2 countries and territories
South Koreans call their language hangugeo and North Koreans call it Chosŏnŏ, each after its own name for the country. Korean belongs to the small Koreanic family with Jeju, and it is written in Hangul, an alphabet created in the 15th century that became the main script only in the mid-20th.
The language on record
- Own name
- 한국어
- ISO 639-1
- KO
- ISO 639-3
- KOR
- Script
- Hangul
- Family
- Koreanic
- Official in
- 2 countries
Where Korean is official
Both Korean states make it official, each with its own standard and regulator. China's Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture also makes Korean official beside Mandarin, below national level.
Official beside Korean
About Korean
How Hangul displaced Chinese characters
Written Chinese reached Korea in the 1st century BC and stayed the medium of government and formal writing until the late 19th century. Scholars bent Chinese characters to Korean in systems such as idu and hyangchal, but these were cumbersome, and most people could not read. In the 15th century the court introduced a featural alphabet in the document Hunminjeongeum, calling it eonmun, the colloquial script. The yangban aristocracy scorned it as too easy to learn, yet it spread through popular novels, and by the 17th century yangban exchanged letters in it with slaves. The Kabo Reform of 1894 ordered government documents in Hangul instead of literary Chinese. North Korea dropped Hanja from writing in 1949 but still teaches it; South Korea keeps it mainly for scholarly papers and for telling words apart.
Where Korean came from
Modern Korean descends from Middle and Old Korean and ultimately from Proto-Koreanic, whose homeland is placed in Manchuria. Whitman, writing in 2012, suggests that proto-Koreans in the north of the peninsula spread south around 300 BC and mixed with Japonic-speaking Mumun farmers. Some linguists once placed Korean in an Altaic family, a proposal that has lost most of its support.
What separates the two standards
Both standards rest on the Seoul dialect. Since the peninsula split, they have drifted apart in pronunciation, spelling, grammar and vocabulary, and North Korea reshaped words for political reasons and in pursuit of a refined language. The North writes place names closer to their original pronunciation, where the South often follows English, and it quotes with guillemets where the South uses quotation marks. Regional dialects within each country differ more than the two standards do. The South's regulator is the National Institute of Korean Language, created on 23 January 1991; the North's is the Language Institute of the Academy of Social Sciences.
Why speech levels matter
The hierarchy of the society the language grew in shaped a system of speech levels and honorifics, and every sentence reflects how formal the situation is.
Common questions
Questions about Korean
Why is the language called Korean in English?
The word comes from Goryeo, thought to be the first Korean dynasty known in the West. The spelling Korea spread in the 1890s and was the de facto standard by 1907.
Is the Jeju language a dialect of Korean?
It is closely related but not mutually intelligible, and the two form the Koreanic family together with a few extinct relatives.
How many letters does Hangul have?
24 basic letters, called jamo, and 27 complex letters built from them.
Do North and South Koreans understand each other?
Yes. The two standards differ in sound and in some words, but less than regional dialects within either country do, and the dialects themselves are largely mutually intelligible.