What is Sino-Korean vocabulary?
'''Sino-Korean vocabulary''', or '''hanja-eo''' ([[hangul]]: 한자어, [[hanja]]: 漢子語) are [[Chinese language|Chinese]] [[loanword]]s in the [[Korean language]]. Like [[Japanese language|Japanese]], Korean is unrelated to the Chinese language. Chinese is a [[Sino-Tibetan languages|Sino-Tibetan language]] while Korean is a language isolate (meaning that no known languages are related to it), but Chinese has influenced Korean so much that it made many changes to the Korean language. Chinese loanwords make up around 60% of the language's vocabulary, even though [[Korean people|Koreans]] tend to use native Korean words a lot more in everyday speech. This is similar to how around 50% of [[English language|English]] words come from [[Latin]], [[French language|French]], or [[Greek language|Greek]], but English speakers tend to use native English words a lot more. Also similar to Japanese, Chinese serves as one the three main sources for Korean words, the other two being native Korean words and words from other foreign languages, especially English. When some Chinese loanwords changed meanings in Japanese, their meanings also changed in Korean because [[Korea under Japanese rule|Korea]] was a Japanese colony at the time these words changed. Since Koreans were forced by law to speak Japanese and forbidden to speak Korean, the Chinese loanwords adopted the new Japanese meanings when Koreans were allowed to freely speak their own language again. Since the [[Korean Peninsula]] split into two different countries, [[North Korea]] and [[South Korea]], the different [[dialect]]s developed very differently from each other. == South Korea == Today, South Koreans write using a mix of hangul (the native Korean alphabet) and hanja 漢子 (the Korean version of [[Chinese character]]s), although they write using the latter far less than Chinese and Japanese do. Since Chinese words often sound similar to each other even in Chinese, they also became [[homophone]]s when they came into Korean, but since Korean lacks [[Tone language|tones]], they