Korean language is the official language of both North Korea and South Korea . It is spoken by about 80 million people around the world, including in such countries as Canada, China, Japan, Kazakhstan, Russia, the United States, and Uzbekistan.
The majority of language scholars consider Korean to be part of the Altaic language family, though this classification is not universally accepted. The Altaic language family includes Mongolian, Turkish, and, according to some scholars, Japanese . Among those languages, Korean is most often compared to Japanese. The two languages share a similar grammatical structure and vocabulary, for example.
Korean is spoken in about seven major dialects. A dialect is a form of a particular language. The dialects generally correspond to the provincial boundaries of North Korea and South Korea.
In Korean, words are formed by linking together morphemes that do not change. Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in a language. For example, the English word rewind is made up of two morphemes: re, which means to repeat or to do again, and wind, which means to twist or to turn around something. Neither re nor wind can be broken down into smaller parts. Morphemes indicate such grammatical functions as tense or number. In some other languages, such as English, morphemes may change when they are combined to form words. For example, rewind becomes rewound in the past tense in English.
Basic word order in Korean is subject-object-verb, as it is in Japanese. However, unlike in English, word order in Korean does not determine the grammatical function of a sentence. For example, in the English sentence “The cat ate the rat,” it is clear from the word order that cat is the subject and rat is the object. In Korean, word order can vary as long as the predicate comes last. Words called postposition words are attached to nouns to indicate their grammatical function.
The honorific system and speech levels (also known as speech styles) are important aspects of the Korean language. The honorific system expresses honor and respect through the use of appropriate nouns, verbs, and honorific suffixes (endings). For example, certain endings are added when speaking to or about someone who is older or one’s superior. Speech levels indicate the speaker’s level of intimacy (closeness) with the person being spoken to—such as a child speaking to a parent, an adult speaking to an adult friend, or an adult speaking to an adult stranger. The six main speech levels are deferential, polite, blunt, familiar, intimate, and plain. They are indicated by endings added to the word at the end of the sentence.
The Korean vocabulary has three types of words: native Korean, Sino-Korean (Chinese in origin), and foreign loanwords. Native Korean words make up about 35 percent of the vocabulary. These include words for parts of the body and indigenous (native) animals, and onomatopoeia. Onomatopoeia are words that imitate sound, such as the buzz of bees and the hoot of owls. Sino-Korean words make up about 60 percent of the vocabulary. These are words that are directly borrowed from the Chinese language or Korean words that were invented using Chinese characters. Foreign loanwords make up about 5 percent of the vocabulary. They mostly come from the English language and include words that pertain to modern technology, such as computer and Internet.
