Is Korean phonetic?
Hanja
Although a phonetic Korean alphabet, now known as Chosŏn'gŭl or Hangul, had been created by Sejong the Great, it did not come into widespread official use until the late 19th and early 20th century. Thus, until that time it was necessary to be fluent in reading and writing Hanja in order to be literate in Korean, as the vast majority of Korean literature and most other Korean documents were written in Literary Chinese, using Hanja as its primary script. Today, a good working knowledge of Chinese characters is still important for anyone who wishes to study older texts (up to about the 1990s), or anyone who wishes to read scholarly texts in the humanities. Learning a certain number of Hanja is very helpful for understanding the etymology of Sino-Korean words, and for enlarging one's Korean vocabulary. Today, Hanja are not used to write native Korean words, which are always rendered in Hangul, and even words of Chinese origin—"Hanja-eo" ()—are written with the Hangul alphabet most of the time, with the corresponding Chinese character often written next to it in order to prevent confusion with other characters or words with the same phonetics.
Origin of Hangul
Korean has a simple tone system often characterized by the poorly defined term "pitch accent". Hangul originally had two diacritics to represent this system, a single tick, as in 성〮, for high tone, and a double tick, as in 성〯, for a long vowel. When transcribing Chinese, these had been used for the 'departing' (去聲) and 'rising' (上聲) tones, respectively. (The 'even' tone (平聲) was not marked. The 'entering' (入聲) "tone", which was not a tone at all, was indicated by its final stop consonant.) Although the pitch and length distinctions are still made in speech by many Koreans, the diacritics are obsolete.
Hangul
With vowel letters, a short stroke connected to the main line of the letter indicates that this is one of the vowels that "can" be iotized; this stroke is then doubled when the vowel "is" iotized. The position of the stroke indicates which harmonic class the vowel belongs to, "light" (top or right) or "dark" (bottom or left). In the modern alphabet, an additional vertical stroke indicates i-mutation, deriving , , and from , , and . However, this is not part of the intentional design of the script, but rather a natural development from what were originally diphthongs ending in the vowel . Indeed, in many Korean dialects, including the standard dialect of Seoul, some of these may still be diphthongs. Note: as a morpheme is ㅓ combined with ㅣ as a vertical stroke. As a phoneme, its sound is not by i-mutation of .
South Korean standard language
South Korean standard language or Pyojun-eo () is the South Korean standard version of the Korean language. It is based on the Seoul dialect. It uses the hangeul alphabet, created in December 1443 by Joseon-era king Sejong the Great. It also occasionally uses Hanja, too. Differing from the North Korean standard language, the South Korean standard language includes many loan-words from Chinese, as well as some from English and from other European languages.
Korean grammar
The most basic, fundamental Korean vocabulary is native to the Korean language, e.g. ("nara", country), ("nal", day). However, a large body of Korean nouns stem from the Korean pronunciation of Chinese characters e.g. "san", "mountain," "yeok", "station," "munhwa", "culture", etc. Many Sino-Korean words have native Korean equivalents and vice versa, but not always. The choice of whether to use a Sino-Korean noun or a native Korean word is a delicate one, with the Sino-Korean alternative often sounding more profound or refined. It is in much the same way that Latin- or French-derived words in English are used in higher-level vocabulary sets (e.g. the sciences), thus sounding more refined – for example, the Anglo-Saxon "ask" versus Romance "inquire".
Origin of Hangul
The Korean alphabet is a featural alphabet written in morpho-syllabic blocks, and was designed for both the Korean and Chinese languages, though the letters specific to Chinese are now obsolete. Each block consists of at least one consonant letter and one vowel letter. When promulgated, the blocks reflected the morphology of Korean, but for most of the fifteenth century they were organized into syllables. In the twentieth century the morpho-syllabic tradition was revived. The blocks were traditionally written in vertical columns from top to bottom, although they are now commonly written in horizontal rows from left to right as well. Spacing has been introduced to separate words in the Western fashion, and punctuation to indicate clauses and sentences, so that the Korean alphabet now transcribes Korean at the levels of feature, segment, syllable, morpheme, word, clause, and sentence. However, the suprasegmental features of tone and vowel length, seen as single and double tick marks to the left of the syllabic blocks in the image in the next section, have been dropped. Six new letters, including two of Sejong's which had become obsolete, were introduced in North Korea in 1948 in order to make the Korean alphabet a perfect morphophonological fit to the Korean language, but they were soon discarded.
Stop consonant
There are a series of stops in the Korean language, sometimes written with the IPA symbol for ejectives, which are produced using "stiff voice", meaning there is increased contraction of the glottis than for normal production of voiceless stops. The indirect evidence for stiff voice is in the following vowels, which have a higher fundamental frequency than those following other stops. The higher frequency is explained as a result of the glottis being tense. Other such phonation types include breathy voice, or murmur; slack voice; and creaky voice.
Dictation (exercise)
In South Korea, "badasseugi" (Hangul: 받아쓰기) is a school exercise for children in the lower grades of elementary schools. The Korean language is written using hangul, which is basically a phonemic alphabet; however, Hangul writing is also morphophonemic, so morphological knowledge (in addition to familiarity with hangul) is necessary for correct dictation. Also, phonological rules such as assimilation, palatalization, and deletion can cause pronunciation to be different from what the written form may suggest. "Badasseugi" may take form of a word, a phrase, or a sentence, and is similar to spelling tests.
South Korea
Korean is the official language of South Korea, and is classified by most linguists as a language isolate. Korean is not related to any Chinese languages, although it incorporates a number of words that are Chinese in origin. Additionally, Korean spoken in South Korea uses a significant number of loan words from English and other European languages. Korean uses an indigenous writing system called Hangul, created in 1446 by King Sejong to provide a convenient alternative to the Classical Chinese Hanja characters that were difficult to learn and did not fit the Korean language well. South Korea still uses some Chinese Hanja characters in limited areas, such as print media and legal documentation.
Chữ Nôm
In Korea and Japan, phonetic systems were developed so that Chinese characters could be taught to the general public. Vietnam's educated class looked down on Nom as inferior to Han, so they were not interested in doing the work required to turn Nom into a form of writing suitable for mass communication. Like Chinese, Vietnamese is a tonal language and has nearly 5,000 distinct syllables. Neither the Korean nor the Japanese writing systems indicate tones, so they cannot be accurately applied to the Vietnamese language without significant modifications to their systems.
Korean phonology
These are all "progressive" assimilation. Korean also has regressive (anticipatory) assimilation: a consonant tends to assimilate in manner but not in place of articulation: Obstruents become nasal stops before nasal stops (which, as just noted, includes underlying ), but do not change their position in the mouth. Velar stops (that is, all consonants pronounced in final position) become ; coronals () become , and labials () become . For example, is pronounced (phonetically ).
History of Korean
Korean being a language isolate, "Proto-Korean" is not a well-defined term, referring to the language spoken in prehistoric Korea during the Bronze and Iron ages. Other theories are the Altaic and Dravido-Korean theory. On the other hand, Alexander Vovin (2015) notes that Koreanic shares some typological features with the four Paleosiberian language groups (e.g. lack of phonemic voiced stops, verb compounding, earlier ergativity), and suggests that it actually has more in common with "Paleosiberian" than with the putative Altaic group.
Vowel harmony
There are three classes of vowels in Korean: positive, negative, and neutral. These categories loosely follow the front (positive) and mid (negative) vowels. Traditionally, Korean had strong vowel harmony; however, this rule is no longer observed strictly in modern Korean. In modern Korean, it is only applied in certain cases such as onomatopoeia, adjectives, adverbs, conjugation, and interjections. The vowel () is considered a partially neutral and a partially negative vowel. There are other traces of vowel harmony in modern Korean: many native Korean words tend to follow vowel harmony such as (, 'person'), and (, 'kitchen').
Comparison of Japanese and Korean
Some previous linguists have listed a tiny number of translations which may be perceived as phonetic parallels. This is exemplified in the following table: 
In addition to the above, there may be a relation between the words for morning (朝, asa; 아침, achim). A historical variant in Korean may have been pronounced "asa" (see: Asadal).
Korea
The classification of Korean is debated. Some linguists place it in the Altaic language family; others consider it to be a language isolate. Korean is agglutinative in its morphology and SOV in its syntax. Like Japanese and Vietnamese, Korean has borrowed much vocabulary from the Chinese or created vocabulary on Chinese models.
History of Korean
Old Korean () corresponds to the Korean language from the beginning of the Three Kingdoms of Korea to the latter part of the North–South States Period, approximately from the first to the tenth century. Use of Classical Chinese by Koreans began in the fourth century or earlier, and phonological writing in Idu script was developed by the sixth century.
Korean language
is aspirated and becomes an alveolo-palatal before or for most speakers (but see North–South differences in the Korean language). This occurs with the tense fricative and all the affricates as well. At the end of a syllable, changes to (example: beoseot () 'mushroom').
Phoneme
A pair of words like "kátur" and "gátur" (above) that differ only in one phone is called a minimal pair for the two alternative phones in question (in this case, and ). The existence of minimal pairs is a common test to decide whether two phones represent different phonemes or are allophones of the same phoneme. To take another example, the minimal pair tip" and dip" illustrates that in English, and belong to separate phonemes, and ; since these two words have different meanings, English speakers must be conscious of the distinction between the two sounds. In other languages, though, including Korean, even though both sounds and occur, no such minimal pair exists. The lack of minimal pairs distinguishing and in Korean provides evidence that in this language they are allophones of a single phoneme . The word is pronounced , for example. That is, when they hear this word, Korean speakers perceive the same sound in both the beginning and middle of the word, whereas an English speaker would perceive different sounds in these two locations. Signed languages, such as American Sign Language (ASL), also have minimal pairs, differing only in (exactly) one of the signs' parameters: handshape, movement, location, palm orientation, and non-manual signal or marker. A minimal pair may exist in the signed language if the basic sign stays the same but one of these parameters changes.
Korean language
Some grammatical constructions are also different:
Some vocabulary is different between the North and the South:
In the North, guillemets and are the symbols used for quotes; in the South, quotation marks equivalent to the English ones, and , are standard, although and are also used.
Gari Ledyard
The Korean language of this period had vowel harmony to a greater extent than it does today. Vowels alternated according to their environment, and fell into "harmonic" groups. This affected the morphology of the language, and Korean phonology described it in terms of "yin" and "yang": If a word had "yang" ('bright') vowels, then most suffixes also had to have a "yang" vowel; and conversely, if the root had "yin" ('dark') vowels, the suffixes needed to be "yin" as well. There was a third group called "mediating" ('neutral' in Western terminology) that could coexist with either "yin" or "yang" vowels.
Samuel Martin (linguist)
In the 1950s Martin worked on issues relating to Japanese and Korean orthography and romanizations. At this time he coined the term "Sino-Xenic" in creating a common nomenclature for Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary, Sino-Korean vocabulary and Sino-Japanese vocabulary. He published a monograph on Japanese orthography in 1952, and in 1954 he was invited by Syngman Rhee, President of South Korea, to give his ideas on the orthographic reform of the Korean script, which were published in 1954 in various Korean newspapers. In 1954 he devised the Yale romanization system for transliterating Korean, which is extensively used by linguists. During this period he also made important contributions on Chinese, producing a monograph on the phonemes of Ancient Chinese in 1953, and an important article on Mandarin phonology in 1957.
Toki Pona
Because of its small phoneme inventory, Toki Pona allows for quite a lot of allophonic variation. For example, may be pronounced as well as , as or as well as , as as well as , and vowels may be either long or short. Both its sound inventory and phonotactics (patterns of possible sound combinations) are found in the majority of human languages and are therefore readily accessible. For example, * are also impossible in Korean and other languages, which is convenient when writing Toki Pona in alternative scripts.
Korean language
There are still a small number who think that Korean might be related to the now discredited Altaic family, but linguists agree today that typological resemblances cannot be used to prove genetic relatedness of languages, as these features are typologically connected and easily borrowed from one language to the other. Such factors of typological divergence as Middle Mongolian's exhibition of gender agreement can be used to argue that a genetic relationship with Altaic is unlikely.
Revised Romanization of Korean
The Revised Romanization of Korean () is the official Korean language romanization system in South Korea proclaimed by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism to replace the older McCune–Reischauer system. The new system eliminates diacritics and apostrophes in favor of digraphs.
Old Chinese phonology
Although the Chinese writing system is not alphabetic, comparison of words whose characters share a phonetic element (a phonetic series) yields much information about pronunciation.
Often the characters in a phonetic series are still pronounced alike, as in the character ("zhōng", 'middle'), which was adapted to write the words "chōng" ('pour', ) and "zhōng" ('loyal', ).
In other cases the words in a phonetic series have very different sounds in any known variety of Chinese, but are assumed to have been similar at the time the characters were chosen.
Phonemic orthography
A narrow phonetic transcription represents phones, the atomic sounds humans are capable of producing, many of which will often be grouped together as a single phoneme in any given natural language, though the groupings vary across languages. English, for example, does not distinguish between aspirated and unaspirated consonants, but other languages, like Korean, Bengali and Hindi, do. On the other hand, Korean does not distinguish between voiced and voiceless consonants unlike a number of other languages.
Korean phonology
In native Korean words, does not occur word initially, unlike in Chinese loans (Sino-Korean vocabulary). In South Korea, it is silent in initial position before and , pronounced before other vowels, and pronounced only in compound words after a vowel. The prohibition on word-initial is called the "initial law" or (). Initial is officially pronounced in North Korea. In both countries, initial in words of foreign origin other than Chinese is pronounced .This rule also extends to in many native and all Sino-Korean words, which is also lost before initial and in South Korean; again, North Korean preserves the phoneme there. Korean has eight vowel phonemes and a length distinction for each. Long vowels are pronounced somewhat more peripherally than short ones. Two more vowels, the mid front rounded vowel ( ) and the close front rounded vowel ( ), 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 as .
Origin of Hangul
The Korean language of this period had vowel harmony to a greater extent than it does today. Vowels alternated in pairs according to their environment. Vowel harmony affected the morphology of the language, and Korean phonology described it in terms of "yin" and "yang": If a root had "yang" ("deep") vowels, then most suffixes also had to have "yang" vowels; conversely, if the root had "yin" ("shallow") vowels, the suffixes needed to be "yin" as well. The seven vowel sounds of Korean thus fell into two harmonic groups of three vowels each, with the seventh vowel, ㅣ "i," falling outside this system. ㅣ "i" was harmonically neutral and could coexist with either "yin" or "yang" vowels, and for this reason was called "mediating". The letters for the "yin" vowels were ㅡ "ɨ," ㅜ "u," ㅓ "ə;" dots, if present, were placed in the "yin" directions of down and left. The "yang" vowel letters were ㆍ "ʌ," ㅗ "o," and ㅏ "a," with the dots in the "yang" directions of up and right.
Korean language
Traditionally, was disallowed at the beginning of a word. It disappeared before , and otherwise became . However, the inflow of western loanwords changed the trend, and now word-initial (mostly from English loanwords) are pronounced as a free variation of either or . The traditional prohibition of word-initial became a morphological rule called "initial law" () in South Korea, which pertains to Sino-Korean vocabulary. Such words retain their word-initial in North Korea.
North–South differences in the Korean language
The following differences are recognised in the consonants. In the Seoul dialect, ㅈ, ㅊ and ㅉ are typically pronounced with alveolo-palatal affricates , , . In the Pyongyang dialect, they are typically pronounced with alveolar affricates , , . Also, and can be pronounced without palatalisation as and in the Pyongyang dialect.
North–South differences in the Korean language
The standard languages in the North and the South share the same types and the same number of phonemes, but there are some differences in the actual pronunciations. The South Korean standard pronunciation is based on the dialect as spoken in Seoul, and the North Korean standard pronunciation is based on the dialect as spoken in Pyongyang.
Korean mixed script
The Sino-Korean pronunciation of "hanja" shares many features in common with modern Cantonese, reflecting the very conservative, and ancient age, of borrowing of many Sino-Korean terms, although the pronunciations of many Sino-Korean words have been somewhat altered by general phonological changes in the language over time. Tone did not survive the brief development in the Middle Korean language period, but Middle Chinese, whence come the earliest borrowings, had already developed tones, and as a result, words distinguished by tone are homophones in modern Korean.
Writing system
Many scholars, e.g. John DeFrancis, reject this class or at least labeling hangul as such. The Korean script is a conscious script creation by literate experts, which Daniels calls a "sophisticated grammatogeny". These include stenographies and constructed scripts of hobbyists and fiction writers (such as Tengwar), many of which feature advanced graphic designs corresponding to phonologic properties. The basic unit of writing in these systems can map to anything from phonemes to words. It has been shown that even the Latin script has sub-character "features".
Orthographic depth
Written Korean represents an interesting hybrid; each phoneme in the language is represented by a letter but the letters are packaged into "square" units of two to four phonemes, each square representing a syllable. Korean is not completely shallow but has some exceptions in which the written word is not pronounced exactly as the individual letter-phoneme correspondences would otherwise require. English has many such instances: compare the pronunciation of the letter "c" in the words "magic" and "magician" or the pronunciation of the letter "i" in "pint" and "mint".
Korean phonology
Korean consonants have three principal positional allophones: initial, medial (voiced), and final (checked). The initial form is found at the beginning of phonological words. The medial form is found in voiced environments, intervocalically and after a voiced consonant such as or . The final form is found in checked environments such as at the end of a phonological word or before an obstruent consonant such as or . Nasal consonants (, , ) do not have noticeable positional allophones beyond initial denasalization, and cannot appear in this position.
Transcription into Korean
Foreign words when used in Korean undergoes transcription, to make them pronounceable and memorable. Transcription into Korean, for the most part, is very similar to or even influenced by transcription into Japanese, although the number of homophones resulted by imperfect mapping of foreign sounds onto native sounds is significant smaller, as Korean has a larger phoneme inventory and a more inclusive phonotactic.
Korean phonology
Morphophonemes are written inside vertical pipes (), phonemes inside slashes (), and allophones inside brackets ().
Jeju language
This vowel is not entirely obsolete outside of Jeju, as it can be found in various brand names. It is often just an aesthetic replacement for the ㅏ vowel in standard Korean.A notable difference between Jeju and the dialects of mainland Korea is a lack of speech formality or honorific deference. For example, while a speaker of the Gyeonggi dialect might say "annyeong haseyo" ("Hello") or "ban'gapseumnida" ("Pleasure to meet you") to an older person, a speaker of the Jeju dialect would say "ban'gapsuda", which would be roughly equivalent to "Howdy" or "Nice ta meet ya" in Gyeonggi dialect. In mainland Korea, it would be inappropriate for a child to say this to an adult, but this usage is normative in Jeju. This is also what caused a further division of language between Jeju island and mainland Korea; Jejueo was dubbed inferior to the standard Korean because of its casual tone and lack of the formal morphemes such as 요 (yo) in 안녕하세요 (an-nyong ha-sae-yo "hello").
Korean phonology
The distinction between and is lost in South Korean dialects but robust in North Korean dialects. For the speakers who do not make the difference, seems to be the dominant form. For most of the speakers who still utilize vowel length contrastively, long is actually . In Seoul Korean, is produced higher than , while in Pyongan, is lower than . In Northeastern Korean tonal dialect, the two are comparable in height and the main contrast is along pitch. Within Seoul Korean, is raised toward while is fronted away from in younger speakers’ speech.
Korea
Modern Korean is written almost exclusively in the script of the Korean alphabet (known as Hangul in South Korea and Chosungul in China and North Korea), which was invented in the 15th century. Korean is sometimes written with the addition of some Chinese characters called Hanja; however, this is only occasionally seen nowadays. While Hangul may appear logographic, it is actually a phonemic alphabet organised into syllabic blocks. Each block consists of at least two of the 24 hangul letters ("jamo"): at least one each of the 14 consonants and 10 vowels. Historically, the alphabet had several additional letters (see obsolete jamo). For a phonological description of the letters, see Korean phonology.
Koreanic languages
The unclassified Khitan language has many similar Korean vocabulary that are not found in Mongolian or Tungusic languages, This suggests a strong Korean presence or that Khitan was in fact a Koreanic or para-Koreanic language.
Korean manual alphabet
The Korean manual alphabet is used by the Deaf in South Korea who speak Korean Sign Language. It is a one-handed alphabet that mimics the shapes of the letters in hangul, and is used when signing Korean as well as being integrated into KSL.
Korean language and computers
The international Unicode standard contains special characters for representing the Korean language in the native hangul phonetic system.  There are two ways supported by Unicode.  The way used by Microsoft Windows is to have every one of the 11,172 syllable combinations as a code and a pre-formed font character.  The other way is to encode letters ("jamos"), and to let the software combine them into correct combinations, which is not supported in Windows.  Of course the former way needs more font memory, but gives the possibility of getting better shapes, since it is complicated to create fully correct combinations which may be preferred when creating documents.
Romanization of Korean
SKATS is a transliteration system that does not attempt to use letters of a similar function in Western languages. A similar approach is to transliterate by hitting the keys that would produce a Korean word on a keyboard with "2[du]-beolsik" layout. This can often be seen on the internet, for example in usernames.
Origin of Hangul
Following the Indic tradition, consonants in the Korean alphabet are classified according to the speech organs involved in their production. However, the Korean alphabet goes a step further, in that the shapes of the letters iconically represent the speech organs, so that all consonants of the same articulation are based on the same shape. That is, the Korean alphabet is a featural alphabet, the only one in the world that is in common use. For example, the shape of the velar consonant (牙音 "molar sound") ㄱ is said to represent the back of the tongue bunched up to block the back of the mouth near the molars. Aspirate ㅋ is derived from this by the addition of a stroke which represents aspiration. Chinese voiced/"muddy" ㄲ is created by doubling ㄱ. (The doubled letters were only used for Chinese, as Korean had not yet developed its series of emphatic consonants. In the twentieth century they were revived for the Korean emphatics.)
Denasalization
Something similar has occurred with word-initial nasals in Korean; in some contexts, are denasalized to . The process is sometimes represented with the IPA and , which simply places the IPA denasalization diacritic on and to show the underlying phoneme.
Korean language
Modern Korean descends from Middle Korean, which in turn descends from Old Korean, which descends from the language spoken in Prehistoric Korea (labeled Proto-Korean), whose nature is debated, in part because Korean genetic origins are controversial (See Koreans for archaeological and genetic studies of the Koreans). A relation of Korean (together with its extinct relatives which form the Koreanic family) with Japanese (along with its extinct relatives which form the Japonic family), has been proposed by linguists such as William George Aston and Samuel Martin. Roy Andrew Miller and others suggested or supported the inclusion of Koreanic and Japonic languages (because of a certain resemblance) in the purported Altaic family (a macro-family that would comprise Tungusic, Mongolian and Turkic families). The Altaic hypothesis has since been largely rejected by most linguistic specialists.
Chinese characters arrived in Korea (See Sino-Xenic pronunciations for further information) together with Buddhism during the Proto-Three Kingdoms era in the 1st century BC. It was adapted for Korean and became known as Hanja, and remained as the main script for writing Korean through over a millennium alongside various phonetic scripts that were later invented such as Idu, Gugyeol and Hyangchal. Mainly privileged elites were educated to read and write in Hanja. However, most of the population was illiterate. In the 15th century, King Sejong the Great personally developed an alphabetic featural writing system known today as Hangul. He felt that Hanja was inadequate to write Korean and that this was the cause of its very restricted use; Hangul was designed to either aid in reading Hanja or replace Hanja entirely. Introduced in the document ""Hunminjeongeum"", it was called ""eonmun"" (colloquial script) and quickly spread nationwide to increase literacy in Korea. Hangul was widely used by all the Korean classes but often treated as ""amkeul"" (script for female) and disregarded by privileged elites, whereas Hanja was regarded as ""jinseo"" (true text). Consequently, official documents were always written in Hanja during the Joseon era. Since most people couldn't understand Hanja, Korean kings sometimes released public notices entirely written in Hangul as early as the 16th century for all Korean classes, including uneducated peasants and slaves. By the 17th century, Korean elites Yangban and their slaves exchanged Hangul letters; that indicates high literacy rate of Hangul in Joseon era. Today, Hanja is largely unused in everyday life due to its inconvenience, but it is still important for historical and linguistic studies. Neither South Korea or North Korea opposes the learning of Hanja, though they are not officially used in North Korea anymore, and their usage in South Korea is mainly reserved for specific circumstances, such as newspapers, scholarly papers, and disambiguation.
Korean honorifics
Pronouns in Korean have their own set of polite equivalents (e.g., 저 ("jeo") is the humble form of 나 ("na", "I") and 저희 ("jeohui") is the humble form of 우리 ("uri", "we")). However, Korean language allows for coherent syntax without pronouns, effectively making Korean a so-called pro-drop language, thus Koreans usually avoid using the second-person singular pronoun, especially when using honorific forms. Third-Person Pronouns are occasionally avoided as well, mainly to maintain sense of politeness. Although honorific form of 너 ("neo", singular "you") is 당신 ("dangsin", literally, "friend" or "dear"), that term is used only as a form of address in a few specific social contexts, such as between two married couples or in an ironic sense between strangers. Other words are usually substituted where possible (e.g., the person's name, a kinship term, a professional title, the plural 여러분 "yeoreobun", or no word at all, relying on context to supply meaning instead).
Emoticon
In South Korea, emoticons use Korean Hangul letters, and the Western style is rarely used. The structures of Korean and Japanese emoticons are somewhat similar, but they have some differences. Korean style contains Korean jamo (letters) instead of other characters. There are countless number of emoticons that can be formed with such combinations of Korean jamo letters. Consonant jamos codice_108, codice_109 or codice_110 as the mouth/nose component and codice_111, codice_112 or codice_113 for the eyes. For example: codice_114, codice_115, codice_116 and codice_117. Faces such as codice_118, codice_119, codice_120 and codice_121, using quotation marks codice_66 and apostrophes codice_67 are also commonly used combinations. Vowel jamos such as ㅜ,ㅠ depict a crying face. Example: codice_124, codice_125 and codice_126 (same function as T in western style). Sometimes ㅡ (not an em-dash "—" but a vowel jamo), a comma or an underscore is added, and the two character sets can be mixed together, as in codice_127, codice_128, codice_129, codice_130, codice_131 and codice_132. Also, semicolons and carets are commonly used in Korean emoticons; semicolons mean sweating (embarrassed). If they are used with ㅡ or – they depict a bad feeling. Examples: codice_133, codice_134, codice_135, codice_136 and codice_137. However, codice_138 means smile (almost all people use this without distinction of sex or age). Others include: codice_139, codice_140, codice_141, codice_142.
Korean language
The IPA symbol (a subscript double straight quotation mark, shown here with a placeholder circle) is used to denote the tensed consonants . Its official use in the Extensions to the 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.
Korean phonology
In 2012, vowel length is reported almost completely neutralized in Korean, except for a very few older speakers of Seoul dialect, for whom the distinctive vowel-length distinction is maintained only in the first syllable of a word.
Koreatown
Many modern Koreatowns will exhibit the usage of the Korean language and Hangul on storefront signs as sometimes on official highway signage. Officially sanctioned Koreatowns may also exhibit signs in the local language. In English, the word "Koreatown", "Little Korea", and "Korea Way" can sometimes be seen, as in the case with the Los Angeles Koreatown. As Korean is the official language of South Korea and North Korea as well as one of the two official languages in China's Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, there are approximately 80 million people who speak Korean worldwide. For over a millennium, Korean was written with adapted Chinese characters called hanja, complemented by phonetic systems like "hyangchal, gugyeol," and "idu". In the 15th century, a national writing system called hangul was commissioned by Sejong the Great, but it only came into widespread use in the 20th century, because of the "yangban" aristocracy's preference for hanja.
Honorific
In Japan, there are three rough divisions of honorifics:Indonesia's Javanese majority ethnicity has many honorifics. For example:Korean honorifics are similar to Japanese honorifics, and similarly, their use is mandatory in many formal and informal social situations. Korean grammar as a whole tends to function on hierarchy; honorific stems are appended to verbs and some nouns, and in many cases, one word may be exchanged for another word entirely with the same verb- or noun-meaning, but with different honorific connotations. Linguists say that there are six levels of honorifics in Korean but, in daily conversation, only four of them are widely used in contemporary Korean. Suffix -si-(시) is used at most honorific verbs, but not always. It is considered very impolite and offensive not to use honorific sentences or words with someone who is older or has a higher social status, and most Koreans avoid using non-honorific sentences with someone they have met for the first time. In Korean, names, first or last, always precede a title, e.g., Park Sonsaengnim, Park Kwanjangnim, etc.
Homophone
The Korean language contains a combination of words that strictly belong to Korean and words that are loanwords from Chinese. Due to Chinese being pronounced with varying tones and Korean's removal of those tones, and because the modern Korean writing system, Hangeul, has a more finite number of phonemes than, for example, Latin-derived alphabets such as that of English, there is a large number of homonyms with both same spelling and pronunciation. For example, ": 'to put on makeup' and ": 'to cremate'. Also, ": 'inheritance' and ": 'miscarriage'. ": 'fart', and ": 'guard'. '밤[밤ː]': 'chestnut', and '밤': 'night'. There are heterographs, but far fewer, contrary to the tendency in English. For example, '학문(學問)': 'learning', and '항문(肛門)': 'anus'. Using hanja (), which are Chinese characters, such words are written differently.
Korean mixed script
Korean mixed script, known in Korean as "hanja honyong" (), "Hanja-seokkeosseugi" (漢字섞어쓰기, 한자섞어쓰기), 'Chinese character mixed usage,' or "gukhanmun honyong" (), 'national Sino-Korean mixed usage,' is a form of writing the Korean language that uses a mixture of the Korean alphabet or "hangul" () and "hanja" (, ), the Korean name for Chinese characters. The distribution on how to write words usually follows that all native Korean words, including grammatical endings, particles and honorific markers are generally written in "hangul" and never in "hanja". Sino-Korean vocabulary or "hanja-eo" (), either words borrowed from Chinese or created from Sino-Korean roots, were generally always written in "hanja" although very rare or complex characters were often substituted with "hangul". Although the Korean alphabet was introduced and taught to people beginning in 1446, most literature until the early twentieth century was written in literary Chinese known as "hanmun" ().
Hangul
Because of syllable clustering, words are shorter on the page than their linear counterparts would be, and the boundaries between syllables are easily visible (which may aid reading, if segmenting words into syllables is more natural for the reader than dividing them into phonemes). Because the component parts of the syllable are relatively simple phonemic characters, the number of strokes per character on average is lower than in Chinese characters. Unlike syllabaries, such as Japanese kana, or Chinese logographs, none of which encode the constituent phonemes within a syllable, the graphic complexity of Korean syllabic blocks varies in direct proportion with the phonemic complexity of the syllable. Unlike linear alphabets such as those derived from Latin, Korean orthography allows the reader to "utilize both the horizontal and vertical visual fields". Finally, since Korean syllables are represented both as collections of phonemes and as unique-looking graphs, they may allow for both visual and aural retrieval of words from the lexicon.
Diacritic
The South Korean government officially revised the romanization of the Korean language in July 2000 to eliminate diacritics.In addition to the above vowel marks, transliteration of Syriac sometimes includes "ə", "e̊" or superscript "" (or often nothing at all) to represent an original Aramaic schwa that became lost later on at some point in the development of Syriac. Some transliteration schemes find its inclusion necessary for showing spirantization or for historical reasons.
Urheimat
The Korean language is spoken in Korea and among emigrants from Korea. Conservative historical linguists tend to classify the Korean language as a language isolate, although other suggest a relationship to the proposed Altaic language family or to Japonic languages.
Korean language and computers
Having text run in vertical lines is supported poorly or not at all by HTML and most word processors, although this is not an issue for modern Korean, as it is usually written horizontally. Until the second half of the 20th century, however, Korean was often written vertically. 15th century texts written in hangul had pitch marks to the left of syllables, which are included in Unicode, although most current fonts do not adequately support them, either.
Korean Sign Language
Korean Sign Language or KSL ( or ) is the deaf sign language of South Korea. It is often referred to simply as , which means signing in general.
Korean language
In general, Korean lacks grammatical gender. As one of the few exceptions, the third-person singular pronoun has two different forms: 그 "geu" (male) and 그녀 "geunyeo" (female). Before 그녀 were invented in need of translating 'she' into korean, 그 was the only one third-person singular pronoun, and had no grammatical gender.
Classification of the Japonic languages
Some critics of this hypothesis (such as Alexander Vovin) claim that there are difficulties in establishing exact phonological laws and that Japanese and Korean have few shared innovations. There are also drastic differences between the native Korean and Japanese number systems.
Korean grammar
Korean is typical of languages with verb-final word order, such as Japanese, in that most affixes are suffixes and clitics are enclitics, modifiers precede the words they modify, and most elements of a phrase or clause are optional.
Sometimes, just using an adverb is insufficient to express the exact meaning the speaker has in mind. The composition of a main verb (or adjective) and a supporting verb (or adjective) can be used in this case, alongside some grammatical features. Suffixes including "-a/eo", "-ge", "-ji", and "-go" are taken by the main verb (or adjective), and the supporting verb (or a.) follows it and is "conjugated".
Korean has general number. That is, a noun on its own is neither singular nor plural. It also has an optional plural marker - "-deul," which is most likely to be used for definite and highly animate nouns (primarily first- and second-person pronouns, to a lesser extent nouns and third-person pronouns referring to humans, etc.) This is similar to several other languages with optional number, such as Japanese.
Linguistic purism in Korean
North Korea is known for eliminating most loanwords, which comprise most of the language differences between North and South. Unlike South Korea, where hanja has been intermittently used in texts, North Korea abolished the usage of Chinese characters in 1949. Many loanwords with hanja, especially academic words that were introduced during Japanese forced occupation, were refined into native Korean. Some examples include:In South Korea, the National Institute of the Korean Language maintains an exhaustive dictionary of refined (purified) language. A refined version is created and decided on by online voting.
Korean language
Another lesser-known theory is the Dravido-Korean languages theory which suggests a southern relation. Korean and Dravidian languages share similar vocabulary, both languages are agglutinative, follow the SOV order, nominal and adjectives follow the same syntax, particles are post positional, modifiers always precede modified words are some of the common features. However, typological similarities such as these could have arisen by chance; for instance, if a given pair of languages were agglutinative, most of the other typological features like SOV order, post-positional particles, modifiers preceding modified words might have evolved to be similar by mere chance (this being the general trend observable in most known agglutinative languages). Comparative linguist Kang Gil-un proposes 1300 Dravidian Tamil cognates in Korean, which would significantly outnumber the number of Dravidian cognates he claims are found in Tungusic, Turkic or Ainu. Nevertheless, he suggests that among currently researchable languages, the Nivkh language is most closely related to Korean. Juha Janhunen argues that the Goguryeo language could have been an Amuric language related to today's Nivkh language.
Cyrillization of Korean
Cyrillization systems for Korean were developed domestically in both North Korea (where it has been proposed to replace the current script in the past) and South Korea; Kontsevich carried out work on the systemization of these rules. In contrast with some systems of romanization of Korean, the transcription is based primarily on the pronunciation of a word, rather than on its spelling.
Taos phonology
is often phonetically
Korean grammar
Under the version of Yale used here, morphemes are written according to their underlying form rather than their spelling in the Korean writing system or pronunciation. Under this system, for example, the syllable which is written in Korean as is analyzed as ess even though the "ss" would be pronounced "t" before another consonant, and the vowel e is pronounced low and somewhat rounded, closer to "o". To avoid confusion, bold type will represent the morphology (in Yale), and "italics" will represent Revised Romanization.
Transcription into Korean
Korean has seven consonants that can occur at the end of a syllable and that are used in transcriptions. Those are /p/, /t/, /k/, /r/, /m/, /n/ and /ŋ/. /p/, /t/ and /k/ generally represent foreign voiceless consonants, although /p/ and /k/ (rendered using jamo ㅂ and ㄱ) occasionally denote voiced consonants, too. E.g.: "lab" and "lap" → 랩 "raep"; "deck" → 덱 "dek". Foreign /t/ is variously rendered as ㅅ or 트 "teu". E.g.: "secret" → 시크릿 "si-keu-rit; "set" → 세트 "se-teu. Foreign /p/, /t/, /k/ are rendered using jamo ㅂ, ㅅ, ㄱ if the preceding foreign vowel is short, but generally using 프 "peu", 트 "teu", 크 "keu" if that vowel is long or a diphthong. E.g.: "map" → 맵 "maep (Japanese マップ "ma-p-pu), but "mark" → 마크 "ma-keu (Japanese マーク "ma-a-ku) and "type" → 타이프 "ta-i-peu (but also 타입 "ta-ip) (Japanese タイプ "ta-i-pu). Foreign /l/, /m/, /n/, /ŋ/ are always rendered using jamo ㄹ, ㅁ, ㄴ, ㅇ, regardless of the quality of the preceding vowel. E.g.: "Tom" → 톰 "Tom; "time" → 타임 "ta-im".
Korean dialects
A number of Korean dialects are spoken in the Korean Peninsula. The peninsula is extremely mountainous and each dialect's "territory" corresponds closely to the natural boundaries between different geographical regions of Korea. Most of the dialects are named for one of the traditional Eight Provinces of Korea. One is sufficiently distinct from the others to be considered a separate language, the Jeju language.Despite North–South differences in the Korean language, the two standards are still broadly intelligible. One notable feature within the divergence is the North's lack of anglicisms due to isolationism and self-reliance—pure/invented Korean words are used in replacement.
Korea
Korean is the official language of both North and South Korea, and (along with Mandarin) of Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in the Manchuria area of China. Worldwide, there are up to 80 million speakers of the Korean language. South Korea has around 50 million speakers while North Korea around 25 million. Other large groups of Korean speakers through Korean diaspora are found in China, the United States, Japan, former Soviet Union and elsewhere.
Syllable
The writing system of a language may not correspond with the phonological analysis of the language in terms of its handling of (potentially) null onsets. For example, in some languages written in the Latin alphabet, an initial glottal stop is left unwritten; on the other hand, some languages written using non-Latin alphabets such as abjads and abugidas have a special zero consonant to represent a null onset. As an example, in Hangul, the alphabet of the Korean language, a null onset is represented with ㅇ at the left or top section of a grapheme, as in 역 "station", pronounced "yeok", where the diphthong "yeo" is the nucleus and "k" is the coda.
Transcription into Korean
Korean has a larger phoneme inventory than Japanese, which allows broader coverage when transcribing foreign sounds. Whereas Japanese uses a single "a" sound for various English sounds such as /æ/, /ɑː/, /ə/, /ʌ/, Korean uses ㅐ "ae" for /æ/, ㅏ "a" for /ɑː/, ㅓ "eo" for /ə/ and /ʌ/. E.g.: "hand" → 핸드 "haen-deu"; "card" → 카드 "ka-deu"; "hunter" → 헌터 "heon-teo". Occasionally, however, the choice of sounds for transcription is influenced by Japanese. E.g.: "brother" → 브라더 "beu-ra-deo" (Japanese ブラザー "bu-ra-za-a"); "dragon" → 드래곤 "deuraegon" (Japanese ドラゴン "do-ra-go-n").
Yale romanization of Korean
The Yale system places primary emphasis on showing a word's morphophonemic structure. This distinguishes it from the other two widely used systems for romanizing Korean, the Revised Romanization of Korean (RR) and McCune–Reischauer. These two usually provide the pronunciation for an entire word, but the morphophonemic elements accounting for that pronunciation often cannot be recovered from the romanizations, which makes them ill-suited for linguistic use. In terms of morphophonemic content, the Yale system's approach can be compared to North Korea's former New Korean Orthography.
Korean speech levels
Casually polite This speech style is called the "polite" style in English. Like 해체 (Hae-che), it is a defective paradigm, meaning it lacks most of the expected conjugational forms. Unlike other speech styles, basic conjugations for declarative, interrogative and imperative are identical, depending on intonation and context or other additional suffixes. Most Korean phrasebooks for foreigners follow this speech style due to its simplicity and proper politeness. Second person pronouns are generally omitted in polite speech styles. See Korean pronouns. It is used:
Hangul
Except for a few grammatical morphemes prior to the twentieth century, no letter stands alone to represent elements of the Korean language. Instead, letters are grouped into syllabic or morphemic blocks of at least two and often three: a consonant or a doubled consonant called the "initial" (초성, 初聲 "choseong" syllable onset), a vowel or diphthong called the "medial" (중성, 中聲 "jungseong" syllable nucleus), and, optionally, a consonant or consonant cluster at the end of the syllable, called the "final" (종성, 終聲 "jongseong" syllable coda). When a syllable has no actual initial consonant, the null initial "ieung" is used as a placeholder. (In the modern Korean alphabet, placeholders are not used for the final position.) Thus, a block contains a minimum of two letters, an initial and a medial. Although the Korean alphabet had historically been organized into syllables, in the modern orthography it is first organized into morphemes, and only secondarily into syllables within those morphemes, with the exception that single-consonant morphemes may not be written alone.
Adoption of Chinese literary culture
Early attempts to write the Korean language used a number of complex and unwieldy systems collectively known as Idu, using Chinese characters both for their meaning and their sound.
The Hangul alphabet announced in 1446 brought Korean reading and writing within reach of virtually the entire population.
King Sejong's announcement of the new script, "The Correct Sounds for the Instruction of the People", was itself written in Literary Chinese like most such documents, and described the new letters in terms of Chinese metaphysics.
Although the new script was clearly more efficient, it was limited to informal writing and recording of folk tales until, as part of the Gabo Reform in December 1894, the civil examinations were abolished and government documents were required to be printed in Korean.
Even then Korean was written with a composite script, with Chinese characters (Hanja) for the Sino-Korean words that now made up over half the vocabulary of the language interspersed with Hangul for native words and suffixes.
Hanja are still taught in schools in both parts of Korea, but fell out of use in North Korea in the late 1940s, and are increasingly rarely used in South Korea.
Gyeonggi dialect
The Gyeonggi dialect (경기 방언) or Seoul dialect (서울 사투리/서울말) of the Korean language is the prestige dialect of the language and the basis of the standardized form used in South Korea. It is spoken throughout the Korean Peninsula and in the Korean diaspora, but it is mainly concentrated in the Seoul National Capital Area, the most densely populated part of South Korea, which includes the cities of Seoul and Incheon, as well as the whole Gyeonggi Province. It is also spoken in the city of Kaesong and the counties of Kaepung and Changpung in North Korea.
Korean phonology
Modern Korean has no falling diphthongs, with sequences like being considered as two separate vowels in hiatus. Middle Korean had a full set of diphthongs ending in , which monophthongized into the front vowels in Early Modern Korean (, , , , ). This is the reason why the hangul letters , , and so on are represented as back vowels plus .
Logogram
This separation, however, also has the great disadvantage of requiring the memorization of the logograms when learning to read and write, separately from the pronunciation. Though not from an inherent feature of logograms but due to its unique history of development, Japanese has the added complication that almost every logogram has more than one pronunciation. Conversely, a phonetic character set is written precisely as it is spoken, but with the disadvantage that slight pronunciation differences introduce ambiguities. Many alphabetic systems such as those of Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, and Finnish make the practical compromise of standardizing how words are written while maintaining a nearly one-to-one relation between characters and sounds. Both English and French orthography are more complicated than that; character combinations are often pronounced in multiple ways, usually depending on their history. Hangul, the Korean language's writing system, is an example of an alphabetic script that was designed to replace the logogrammic hanja in order to increase literacy. The latter is now rarely used in Korea, but retains some currency in South Korea, sometimes in combination with hangul.
Voice of Korea
Voice of Korea () is the international broadcasting service of North Korea. It broadcasts primarily information in Chinese, Spanish, German, English, French, Russian, Japanese, and Arabic. Until 2002 it was known as Radio Pyongyang. The interval signal is identical to that of Korean Central Television.
Chinese language
Although they used Chinese solely for written communication, each country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud, the so-called Sino-Xenic pronunciations. Chinese words with these pronunciations were also extensively imported into the Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese languages, and today comprise over half of their vocabularies. This massive influx led to changes in the phonological structure of the languages, contributing to the development of moraic structure in Japanese and the disruption of vowel harmony in Korean.
New Korean Orthography
The New Korean Orthography was a spelling reform used in North Korea from 1948 to 1954. It added five consonants and one vowel letter to the hangul alphabet, making it what is believed to be a more morphophonologically "clear" approach to the Korean language.
Korean language
The Korean language ( / "Hangugeo"; / "Chosŏnmal") is an East Asian language spoken by about 80 million people. It is a member of the Koreanic language family and is the official and national language of both Koreas: North Korea and South Korea, with different standardized official forms used in each territory. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture and Changbai Korean Autonomous County of Jilin province, China. Historical and modern linguists classify Korean as a language isolate; however, it does have a few extinct relatives, which together with Korean itself and the Jeju language (spoken in the Jeju Province and considered somewhat distinct) form the Koreanic language family. This implies that Korean is not an isolate, but a member of a micro-family. The idea that Korean belongs to the controversial Altaic language family is discredited in academic research. Korean is agglutinative in its morphology and SOV in its syntax.
Korean language
The hypothesis that Korean might be related to Japanese has had some supporters due to some 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. Some linguists concerned with the issue, for example 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. A good example might be Middle Korean "sàm" and Japanese "asá", meaning "hemp". This word seems to be a cognate, but although it is well attested in Western Old Japanese and Northern Ryukyuan languages, in Eastern Old Japanese it only occurs in compounds, and it is only present in three dialects of the Southern Ryukyuan language group. Also, the doublet "wo" meaning "hemp" is attested in Western Old Japanese and Southern Ryukyuan languages. It is thus plausible to assume a borrowed term. (See Classification of the Japonic languages for further details on a possible relationship.)
Hangul
The simple iotized vowels are:There are also two iotized diphthongs:The Korean language of the 15th century had vowel harmony to a greater extent than it does today. Vowels in grammatical morphemes changed according to their environment, falling into groups that "harmonized" with each other. This affected the morphology of the language, and Korean phonology described it in terms of "yin" and "yang": If a root word had "yang" ('bright') vowels, then most suffixes attached to it also had to have "yang" vowels; conversely, if the root had "yin" ('dark') vowels, the suffixes had to be "yin" as well. There was a third harmonic group called "mediating" ('neutral' in Western terminology) that could coexist with either "yin" or "yang" vowels.
Mid front unrounded vowel
The mid front unrounded vowel is a type of vowel sound that is used in some spoken languages. There is no dedicated symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the exact mid front unrounded vowel between close-mid and open-mid , but it is normally written . If precision is required, diacritics may be used, such as or (the former, indicating lowering, being more common). In Sinology and Koreanology , (small capital E, U+1D07, ) is sometimes used, for example in the Zhengzhang Shangfang reconstructions.
Classification of the Japonic languages
But Japanese and Korean languages share also some typological similarities, such as an agglutinative morphology, a subject–object–verb (SOV) normal word order, important systems of honorifics (however, the two languages' systems of honorifics are different in form and usage; see Japanese honorifics and Korean honorifics), besides a few lexical resemblances. Factors like these led some historical linguists to suggest a genetic relationship between the two languages.
Korean language
Korean has numerous small local dialects (called "mal" () [literally "speech"], "saturi" (), or "bang'eon" ( in Korean). The standard language ("pyojun-eo" or "pyojun-mal") of both South Korea and North Korea is based on the dialect of the area around Seoul (which, as Hanyang, was the capital of Joseon-era Korea for 500 years), though the northern standard after the Korean War has been influenced by the dialect of P'yŏngyang. All dialects of Korean are similar to each other and largely mutually intelligible (with the exception of dialect-specific phrases or non-Standard vocabulary unique to dialects), 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 the 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.
Hangul
The orthography of the Korean alphabet was partially standardized in 1912, when the vowel "arae'a" ()–which has now disappeared from Korean–was restricted to Sino-Korean roots: the emphatic consonants were standardized to and final consonants restricted to . Long vowels were marked by a diacritic dot to the left of the syllable, but this was dropped in 1921.
Korean phonology
This article is a technical description of the phonetics and phonology of Korean. Unless otherwise noted, statements in this article refer to South Korean standard language based on the Seoul dialect.
Korean language
In South Korea, the Korean language is referred to by many names including "hanguk-eo" ("Korean language"), "hanguk-mal" ("Korean speech") and "uri-mal" ("our language"). In ""hanguk-eo"" and ""hanguk-mal"", the first part of the word, ""hanguk"" was taken from the name of the Korean Empire (). The ""Han"" (韓) in "Hanguk" and "Daehan Jeguk" is derived from Samhan, in reference to the Three Kingdoms of Korea (not the ancient confederacies in the southern Korean Peninsula), while ""-eo"" and ""-mal"" mean "language" and "speech", respectively. Korean is also simply referred to as "guk-eo", literally "national language". This name is based on the same Han characters, meaning "nation" + "language" ("國語"), that are also used in Taiwan and Japan to refer to their respective national languages.
Korean punctuation
For the Korean language, South Korea mainly uses a combination of East Asian and European punctuation, while North Korea uses a little more of the East Asian punctuation style.In the North, guillemets and are the symbols used for quotes; in the South, quotation marks are equivalent to the English ones. and , are standard, although , , , and are commonly used.
Names of Korea
European languages use variations of the name "Korea" for both North and South Korea. In general, Celtic and Romance languages spell it "Corea" (or variations) since "c" represents the /k/ sound in most Romance and Celtic orthographies. However, Germanic and Slavic languages largely use variants of "Korea" since, in many of these languages, "c" represents other sounds such as /ts/. In languages using other alphabets such as Russian (Cyrillic), variations phonetically similar to "Korea" are also used for example the Russian name for Korea is Корея, romanization Koreya. Outside of Europe, most languages also use variants of "Korea", often adopted to local orthographies. "Korea" in the Jurchen Jin's national language (Jurchen) is "Sogo". "Korea" in the conlang Esperanto is "Koreio". "Korea" in Hmong is "Kauslim". Within Spain, the Basque Country and Navarre regions use the spelling "Korea" in their Basque language, while the rest of the country uses "Corea", but this usage is related to national language politics rather than international usage.
Korean Braille
Korean Braille is the braille alphabet of the Korean language. It is not graphically-related to other braille scripts found around the world. Instead, it reflects the patterns found in hangul, and differentiates initial consonants, vowels, and final consonants.
History of Korean
Homer Hulbert claimed the Korean language was Ural-Altaic in his book, "The History of Korea" (1905). The classification of Korean as Altaic was introduced by Gustaf John Ramstedt (1928), but even within the debunked Altaic hypothesis, the position of Korean relative to Japonic is unclear. A possible Korean–Japonic grouping within Altaic has been discussed by Samuel Martin, Roy Andrew Miller and Sergei Starostin. Others, notably Vovin, interpret the affinities between Korean and Japanese as an effect caused by geographic proximity sprachbund.
Korean numerals
For both native and Sino- Korean numerals, the teens (11 through 19) are represented by a combination of tens and the ones places. For instance, 15 would be "sib-o" (), but not usually "il-sib-o" in the Sino-Korean system, and "yeol-daseot" () in native Korean. Twenty through ninety are likewise represented in this place-holding manner in the Sino-Korean system, while Native Korean has its own unique set of words, as can be seen in the chart below. The grouping of large numbers in Korean follow the Chinese tradition of myriads (10000) rather than thousands (1000). The Sino-Korean system is nearly entirely based on the Chinese numerals.
Korean phonology
Korean syllable structure is maximally /CGVC/, where /G/ is a glide . Any consonant except may occur initially, but only may occur finally. Sequences of two consonants may occur between vowels, as outlined above. However, morphemes may also end in CC clusters, which are both expressed only when they are followed by a vowel. When the morpheme is not suffixed, one of the consonants is not expressed; if there is a , which cannot appear in final position, it will be that. Otherwise it will be a coronal consonant (with the exception of ㄼ), and if the sequence is two coronals, the voiceless one () will drop, and or will remain. Thus, no sequence reduces to in final position.
Korean language and computers
When using a keyboard from another language, most operating systems require the user to type using an original Korean keyboard layout, the most common of which is "2(du)-beolsik". This is in contrast to some other languages, like Japanese, where text can be entered using a Romanization system on non-native keyboards.
Comparison of Japanese and Korean
The geographically close Japanese and Korean languages share considerable similarity in typological features of their syntax and morphology while having a small number of lexical resemblances and different native scripts (although they both use the Chinese characters, called hanja in Korea and kanji in Japan; see "Writing" section). Observing the said similarities and probable history of Korean migration to prehistoric Japan, linguists have formulated different theories proposing a genetic relationship between them, though these studies either lack conclusive evidence or were subsets of theories that have suffered large discredit (like versions of the well-known Altaic hypothesis that mainly attempted to group the Turkic, Mongolian and Tungusic languages together). Due to the lack of a sufficient reconstruction of Proto-Japonic and Proto-Korean, any relation between the languages that may have existed may never be conclusively proven (see: Japonic migration from Korea hypothesis and Gaya language).
Korean language and computers
In , a method known as ISO-2022-KR for a 7-bit encoding of Korean characters in email was described.  Where 8 bits are allowed, the EUC-KR encoding is preferred.  These two encodings combine US-ASCII (ISO 646) with the Korean standard KS X 1001:1992 (previously named KS C 5601:1987).  In North Korea, a separate character set called KPS 9566 is in use, which is rather similar to KS X 1001.