Outline of the Korean language

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The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the Korean language:

Contents

Korean East Asian language spoken by about 80 million people. [1] It is a member of the Koreanic language family and is the official and national language of North Korea and South Korea, which form Korea. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture and Changbai Korean Autonomous County of Jilin, China. Historical and modern linguists classify Korean as a language isolate; [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] however, it does have a few extinct relatives, which together with Korean and the Jeju language (spoken on Jeju Island and considered distinct) form the Koreanic language family. [8] [9] Korean is agglutinative in its morphology and SOV in its syntax.

History

Hangul

Hangul

Online

In non-Korean languages

Chinese characters

Other language systems

Grammar

Korean grammar

Linguistics

Dialects and relatives

In Korea

North Korea

South Korea

Jeju

Outside Korea

Transliteration

Romanization

Romanization of Korean

Cyrillization

Etymology

Korean dictionaries

Organizations and institutions

Related Research Articles

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Altaic is a controversial proposed language family that would include the Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic language families and possibly also the Japonic and Koreanic languages. The hypothetical language family has long been rejected by most comparative linguists, although it continues to be supported by a small but stable scholarly minority. Speakers of the constituent languages are currently scattered over most of Asia north of 35° N and in some eastern parts of Europe, extending in longitude from the Balkan Peninsula to Japan. The group is named after the Altai mountain range in the center of Asia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Korean language</span> Language spoken in Korea

Korean is the native language for about 81.7 million people, mostly of Korean descent. It is the official and national language of both South Korea and North Korea. The two countries have established standardized norms for Korean, and the differences between them are similar to those between Standard Chinese in mainland China and Taiwan, but political conflicts between the two countries have highlighted the differences between them. South Korean newspaper Daily NK has claimed North Korea criminalizes the use of the South's standard language with the death penalty, and South Korean education and media often portray the North's language as alien and uncomfortable.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kra–Dai languages</span> Language family of mainland Southeast Asia

The Kra–Dai languages, are a language family in mainland Southeast Asia, southern China, and northeastern India. All languages in the family are tonal, including Thai and Lao, the national languages of Thailand and Laos, respectively. Around 93 million people speak Kra–Dai languages; 60% of those speak Thai. Ethnologue lists 95 languages in the family, with 62 of these being in the Tai branch.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Turkic languages</span> Language family of Eurasia

The Turkic languages are a language family of more than 35 documented languages, spoken by the Turkic peoples of Eurasia from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe to Central Asia, East Asia, North Asia (Siberia), and West Asia. The Turkic languages originated in a region of East Asia spanning from Mongolia to Northwest China, where Proto-Turkic is thought to have been spoken, from where they expanded to Central Asia and farther west during the first millennium. They are characterized as a dialect continuum.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mongolic languages</span> Language family of Eurasia

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Samuel E. Martin</span> American linguist (1924–2009)

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The traditional periodization of Korean distinguishes:

Ralf-Stefan Georg is a German linguist. He is currently Professor at the University of Bonn in Bonn, Germany, for Altaic Linguistics and Culture Studies.

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Koreanic is a small language family consisting of the Korean and Jeju languages. The latter is often described as a dialect of Korean, but is distinct enough to be considered a separate language. Alexander Vovin suggested that the Yukjin dialect of the far northeast should be similarly distinguished. Korean has been richly documented since the introduction of the Hangul alphabet in the 15th century. Earlier renditions of Korean using Chinese characters are much more difficult to interpret.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hangul</span> Native alphabet of the Korean language

The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul in South Korea and Chosŏn'gŭl (조선글) in North Korea, is the modern official writing system for the Korean language. The letters for the five basic consonants reflect the shape of the speech organs used to pronounce them, and they are systematically modified to indicate phonetic features; similarly, the vowel letters are systematically modified for related sounds, making Hangul a featural writing system. It has been described as a syllabic alphabet as it combines the features of alphabetic and syllabic writing systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Comparison of Japanese and Korean</span> Linguistic comparison

The geographically proximate languages of Japanese and Korean share considerable similarity in syntactic and morphological typology while having a small number of lexical resemblances. Observing the said similarities and probable history of Korean influence on Japanese culture, 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 largely been discredited. There has been new research which has revived the possibility of a genealogical link, such as the Transeurasian hypothesis by Robbeets et al., supported by computational linguistics and archaeological evidence, but this view has received significant criticism as well.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ainu languages</span> Language family of northern Japan and neighboring islands

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References

  1. Summary by language size, table 3
  2. Song, Jae Jung (2005), The Korean language: structure, use and context, Routledge, p. 15, ISBN   978-0-415-32802-9 .
  3. Campbell, Lyle; Mixco, Mauricio (2007), "Korean, A language isolate", A Glossary of Historical Linguistics, University of Utah Press, pp. 7, 90–91, most specialists... no longer believe that the... Altaic groups... are related […] Korean is often said to belong with the Altaic hypothesis, often also with Japanese, though this is not widely supported.
  4. Dalby, David (1999–2000), The Register of the World's Languages and Speech Communities, Linguasphere Press.
  5. Kim, Nam-Kil (1992), "Korean", International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, vol. 2, pp. 282–86, scholars have tried to establish genetic relationships between Korean and other languages and major language families, but with little success.
  6. Róna-Tas, András (1998), "The Reconstruction of Proto-Turkic and the Genetic Question", The Turkic Languages, Routledge, pp. 67–80, [Ramstedt's comparisons of Korean and Altaic] have been heavily criticised in more recent studies, though the idea of a genetic relationship has not been totally abandoned.
  7. Schönig, Claus (2003), "Turko-Mongolic Relations", The Mongolic Languages, Routledge, pp. 403–19, the 'Altaic' languages do not seem to share a common basic vocabulary of the type normally present in cases of genetic relationship.
  8. Sanchez-Mazas; Blench; Ross; Lin; Pejros, eds. (2008), "Stratification in the peopling of China: how far does the linguistic evidence match genetics and archaeology?", Human migrations in continental East Asia and Taiwan: genetic, linguistic and archaeological evidence, Taylor & Francis
  9. Vovin, Alexander. "Korean as a Paleosiberian Language (English version of 원시시베리아 언어로서의 한국어)".{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)