Korean language

Korean belongs to the Koreanic language family and is native to the Korean Peninsula. Roughly 81 million people speak it, making up the vast majority of its speakers. It holds official status in both North and South Korea, where it is called Chosŏnŏ and Hangugeo, respectively. Starting around the year 2000, Korean pop culture began spreading worldwide through globalization and cultural exports. The language is written using Hangul, an alphabet system created in the 1400s to improve literacy.

Outside the Korean Peninsula, Korean is recognized as a minority language in parts of China, specifically in Jilin Province, including Yanbian Prefecture and Changbai County. It is also spoken by Sakhalin Koreans on the Russian island of Sakhalin, just north of Japan, and by the Koryo-saram community in parts of Central Asia. The Jeju language, spoken on Jeju Island, is closely related to Korean but not mutually intelligible. Along with a few extinct relatives, these languages form the compact Koreanic family. The likely homeland of the Korean language is thought to be somewhere in modern Manchuria. The hierarchical nature of the society that produced Korean deeply shaped the language, resulting in a system of speech levels and honorifics that reflect the formality of any situation.

Modern Korean is written using the Korean script—called Hangeul in the South and Chosŏn'gŭl in the North. This alphabet was developed in the 15th century specifically for the language, though it did not become the primary writing system until the mid-20th century. Before that, Hanja and mixed script were dominant. The script consists of 24 basic letters (jamo) and 27 complex letters built from them.

Interest in learning Korean as a foreign language has grown due to long-standing alliances, military involvement, and diplomacy—such as the relationships between South Korea and the United States, and between China and North Korea—since the end of World War II and the Korean War. Along with languages like Chinese and Arabic, Korean is ranked at the highest difficulty level for English speakers by the U.S. Department of Defense.

**History**

Modern Korean comes from Middle Korean, which itself comes from Old Korean, which traces back to Proto-Koreanic. The homeland of Proto-Koreanic is generally thought to be somewhere in Manchuria. According to Whitman (2012), proto-Koreans already living in northern Korea moved into the southern part of the peninsula around 300 BC, where they coexisted with—or absorbed—the descendants of Japonic Mumun cultivators. The two groups influenced each other, and a later founder effect reduced the internal diversity of both language families.

After the establishment of two separate governments, differences between North and South Korean standards emerged, including variations in pronunciation and word choice. Although there is strong political tension between the two Koreas over these linguistic differences, the regional dialects within each country actually show greater variation than the differences between the two standard forms. Still, these dialects remain largely mutually intelligible.

**Writing Systems**

Chinese, written with Chinese characters and read using Sino-Xenic pronunciations, was introduced to Korea in the 1st century BC. It remained the language of formal writing and government until the late 1800s. Korean scholars adapted Chinese characters (called Hanja in Korean) to write their own language, creating scripts known as idu, hyangchal, gugyeol, and gakpil. These systems were awkward because of the fundamental differences between Korean and Chinese, and only those educated in classical Chinese could use them. Most of the population was illiterate.

In the 15th century, King Sejong the Great personally developed an alphabetic featural writing system, now called Hangul, to promote literacy among ordinary people. Introduced in the document *Hunminjeongeum*, it was called eonmun ("colloquial script") and quickly spread across the country, raising literacy rates. The yangban aristocracy condemned the Korean alphabet for being too easy to learn, but it became widely used by commoners, who enjoyed popular novels printed in it. Because few people could understand official documents written in classical Chinese, Korean kings sometimes issued public notices entirely in Hangul as early as the 1500s, reaching all classes, including uneducated peasants and slaves. By the 1600s, yangban were exchanging letters written in Hangul with slaves, suggesting high Hangul literacy during the Joseon era.

Amid growing Korean nationalism in the 1800s, the Kabo Reform of 1894 abolished Confucian examinations and decreed that government documents would be written in Hangul instead of literary Chinese. Some newspapers were published in Hangul, but others used mixed script, with Hanja for Sino-Korean vocabulary and Hangul for everything else. North Korea abolished Hanja in writing in 1949 but still teaches it in schools. In South Korea, Hanja is mainly used in specific contexts like newspapers, scholarly papers, and disambiguation. Today, Hanja is largely absent from daily life but remains important for historical and linguistic study.

**Names**

The Korean names for the language come from the names for Korea used in the North and South. The English word "Korean" comes from Goryeo, thought to be the first Korean dynasty known to Western nations. Korean people in the former USSR call themselves Koryo-saram or Koryo-in (meaning "Goryeo people") and refer to their language as Koryo-mar. Some older English sources also spell the country as "Corea," with the same spelling applied to the language, culture, and people.