All Koreans speak and write the same language, which has been a decisive factor in forging their strong national identity. Koreans have developed several different dialects in addition to the standard used in Seoul. However, the dialects, except for that of Jeju-do Province, are similar enough for native speakers to understand without any major difficulties.
Linguistic and ethnological studies have classified the Korean language in the Altaic language family, which includes the Turkic, Mongolic and Tungus-Manchu languages.
The Korean Alphabet, Hangeul, was created by King Sejong the Great during the 15th century. Before its creation, only a relatively small percentage of the population was literate; few could master the difficult Chinese characters used by the upper class.
In attempting to invent a Korean writing system, King Sejong looked to several writing systems known at the time, such as old Chinese seal characters and Uighur and Mongolian scripts.
The system that Joseon scholars came up with, however, is predominantly based upon phonological studies. Above all, they developed and followed a theory of tripartite division of the syllable into initial, medial and final phonemes, as opposed to the bipartite division of traditional Chinese phonology.
Hangeul, which consists of 10 vowels and 14 consonants, can be combined to form numerous syllabic groupings. It is simple, yet systematic and comprehensive, and is considered one of the most scientific writing systems in the world. Hangeul is easy to learn and write, which has greatly contributed to Korea's high literacy rate and advanced publication industry.
Korean language is spoken by about 70 million people. Although most speakers of Korean live on the Korean Peninsula and its adjacent islands, more than 5 million are scattered throughout the world.
The origin of the Korean language is as obscure as the origins of the Korean people. In the 19th century when Western scholars "discovered" the Korean language, from what family of languages the Korean language derived was one of the first question. These scholars proposed various theories linking the Korean language with Ural-Altaic, Japanese, Chinese, Tibetan, Dravidian, Ainu, Indo-European and other languages. Among these theories, only the relationship between Korean and Altaic (which groups the Turkic, Mongolian and Manchu-Tungus languages) and the relationship between Korean and Japanese have continuously attracted the attention of comparative linguists in the 20th century.
Altaic, Korean and Japanese not only exhibit similarities in their general structure, but also share common features such as vowel harmony and lack of conjunctions, although the vowel harmony in old Japanese has been the object of dispute among specialists in the field. These languages also have various common elements in their grammar and vocabulary.
History
According to early historical records, two groups of languages were spoken in
Manchuria and on the Korean Peninsula at the dawn of the Christian era: one
belonged to the Northern Buyeo group and the other to the Southern Han group.
Around the middle of the 7th century when the kingdom of Silla unified the peninsula,
its language became the dominant form of communication. As a result, the linguistic
unification of the peninsula was achieved on the basis of the Silla language.
When the Goryeo Dynasty was founded in the 10th century, the capital was moved
to Gaeseong, located at the center of the Korean Peninsula. From that time onward,
the dialect of Gaeseong became the standard national language. After the Joseon
Dynasty was founded at the end of the 14th century, the capital was moved to
Hanyang, today's Seoul. However, since Seoul is geographically close to Gaeseong,
the move had little significant effect on the development of the language.
Korean Script
The Korean script which is now generally called Han-geul was invented in 1443
under the reign of King Sejong (r.1418-1450), the fourth king of the Joseon
Dynasty. It was then called
Hunminjeongeum, or proper sounds to instruct
the people. The script was promulgated in 1446 in a document which was also
called
Hunminjeongeum. The motivation behind the invention of the Korean
script, according to King Sejong's preface to the above book, was to enable
the Korean people to write their own language without the use of Chinese characters.
Until the introduction of
Hunminjeongeum, Chinese characters were used
by the upper classes, and Idu letters, a kind of Chinese-based Korean character
system, were used by the populace. There also seems to have been a second motivation
behind the development of Korean script: to represent the "proper" sound associated
with each Chinese character.
In attempting to invent a Korean writing system, King Sejong and the scholars
who assisted him probably looked to several writing systems known to them at
the time, such as Chinese old seal characters, the Uighur script and the Mongolian
scripts. The system that they came up with, however, is predominantly based
upon their own phonological studies. Above all, they developed a theory of tripartite
division of the syllable into initial, medial and final, as opposed to the bipartite
division of traditional Chinese phonology.
The initial sounds (consonants) are represented by 17 letters of which there
are five basic forms. According to the explanations of the original
Hunminjeongeum
text,
¤¡ (g) depicts the root of the tongue blocking the throat;
¤¤ (n) depicts the outline of the tongue touching the upper palate;
¤± (m) depicts the outline of the mouth;
¤µ (s) depicts the outline of the incisor; and
¤· (ng) depicts the outline of the throat.
The other initial letters were derived by adding strokes to the basic letters.
No letters were invented for the final sounds, the initial letters being used
for that purpose.
The original
Hunminjeongeum text also explains that the medial sounds
(vowels) are represented by 11 letters of which there are three basic forms:
. |
(a) is a depiction of Heaven |
_ |
(eu) is a depiction of Earth |
l |
(i) is a depiction of man |
By combining these three signs, the other medial letters are
formed. |
After the promulgation of the Korean alphabet, its popularity gradually increased,
particularly in modern times, to the point where it has replaced Chinese characters
as the primary writing system in the country.
³ª¹« (na-mu) "tree" |
»ç¶÷ (sa-ram) "man" |
¼Õ´Ô (son-nim) "guest" |
One of the more interesting characteristics of the Korean script is its syllabic
grouping of the initial, medial and final letters. Some examples are as follows:
Standard Language and Orthography
Modern Korean is divided into six dialects: Central, Northwest, Northeast, Southeast,
Southwest and Jeju. Except for the Jeju dialect, these are similar enough for
speakers of the various dialects to communicate. This is due to the fact that
Korea has been a centralized state for more than a thousand years. The language
of the capital exercised a steady influence on the language spoken throughout
the country.
The language of the capital was established as the basis for modern standard
Korean in 1936, as a result of the deliberations of a committee organized by
the Korean Language Research Society. The language of the political and cultural
center of a nation usually becomes the standard language for the entire population.
In Korea, however, the case was somewhat different, since the guidelines for
the national language standard were set forth by a small but dedicated group
of scholars who had worked during the Japanese occupation. They endeavored to
preserve their own language in the face of an oppressive regime which had sought
the eventual extinction of the Korean language.
Modern orthography was also determined by this same Korean Language Research
Society in 1933. In this way, Korean orthography, rather than being a product
of a gradual process of natural selection, was deliberately manufactured. Whereas
15th century orthography had been based on a phonemic principle, with each letter
representing one phoneme, modern Korean orthography operates on a morphophonemic
principle. That is, while a morpheme, or a minimum meaningful unit, may be realized
differently according to its context, its orthographic representation is a single
base form. The Korean word "°ª" for "price," for example,
is pronounced [gaps] or [gap], according to the context; nevertheless, it is
always spelled according to its base form, "°ª."
Phonology
The Korean language possesses a rich variety of vowels and consonants with nine
simple vowels and three series of stops and affricates: plain, aspirated, and
glottalized. These variations make it difficult for foreigners to learn and
pronounce the language. They also complicate the task of Romanization.
Phonemes of the plain stop series are realized as unvoiced sounds in the word-initial
position, voiced sounds in the intervocalic position and unreleased sounds in
the word-final position, e.g. °© [gap] "case or small box" and °©¿¡ [gabe]
"in the case." The liquid phoneme is realized as [r] in the intervocalic
position and [l] in the word-final position. For example, ´Þ [dal] "moon,"
and ´Þ¿¡ [dare] "at the moon."
Consonants |
|
Notes: The letter o has a double function: in the final position,
it denotes a nasal consonant (n, g), while in the initial position, it
denotes that the syllable begins with a vowel. |
Vowels |
|
Another characteristic of modern Korean is that there are no consonant clusters
or liquid sounds in the word-initial position. As a result, Koreans pronounce
the English word "stop" in two syllables, as [
seu-top], and change the
initial [l] or [r] in foreign words to [n]. Recently, however, there has been
a tendency to pronounce initial liquid sounds in Western loan words.
Korean is similar to the Altaic languages in that it possesses vowel harmony.
Evidence indicates that vowel harmony was rigidly observed in old Korean, but
rules have been significantly weakened in modern Korean. Vowel harmony nevertheless
continues to play an important role in the onomatopoetic and mimetic words so
abundant in the language.
Romanization
Korean is a difficult language to Romanize, given the variety of vowel and consonant
phonemes and the complex rules for their realization. Of the Romanization systems
that have been in use since the 19th century, the most widely accepted have
been the McCune-Reischauer System (1939), and the Ministry of Education System
(1959). The former has been used mainly in the United States and other Western
countries, while the latter has been used in Korea. In 1984, however, the Korean
system was revised along the lines of the McCune-Reischauer System, with a few
modifications, so that the two systems most widely used in Korea and the West
were, in effect, the same.
Examples of Syllabics |
|
Examples of Sentences |
|
There is a high mountain in front of the village
(1) Noun: village
(2) Noun: front
(3) Locative particle: at, in
(4) Adjectival stem: to be high
(5) Ending, marking the modifier
(6) Noun: mountain
(7) Particle, marking the subject
(8) Verbal stem: to exist
(9) Sentence-final ending |
|
|
There was, however, a drastic revision of Romanization system by the Korean
Government in 2000, which, in effect, returned to the system of 1959. This was
made necessary by the widespread use of the computer which required automatic
transliteration in searching words. There also was the need to adopt a system
which does not use diacritical signs as those seen in the M-R System. The Romanized
forms in this book reflect the latest revised system.
Morphology and Syntax
Korean is one of the so-called agglutinative languages which add suffixes to
nominal and verbal stems in derivation and inflection. Suffixes agglutinate
one after another and indicate different styles of speech, express moods and
aspects, and function as case markers, connectives, etc. Vowel gradation, that
is, the change of vowels to make morphological distinctions such as singular-plural
in nouns (e.g.
man-men) and present-past in verbs (e.g.
sing-sang),
is not found in Korean.
Korean is a verb-final language: the verb is always the last constituent of
the sentence. Constituents other than verbs are relatively free to switch around,
although the normal and preferred word order is subject-object-verb. In Korean,
modifying words or phrases precede the modified words without exception: adjectives
precede nouns, adverbs precede verbs, etc. Since Korean has no relative clauses,
the clauses precede the nouns they modify however long they may be. One of the
important characteristics of Korean grammar is the honorific system. Korean
is perhaps the only language in the world which has honorific suffixes such
as -si-, exalting the subject of the sentence, and -
seumni-, showing
the speaker's respect to the hearer. Although Japanese has a well-developed
system of honorific expressions, it is different from that of Korean in that
it utilizes auxiliary verbs instead of suffixes.
Vocabulary
The vocabulary of the Korean language is composed of indigenous words and loanwords,
the latter being the result of contact with other languages. The majority of
the loanwords are of Chinese origin, often called Sino-Korean words, a reflection
of several millennia of Chinese cultural influence on Korea. In modern Korean,
native words are significantly outnumbered by Sino-Korean words. As a result,
a dual system of native and Sino-Korean words pervades the Korean lexicon, including
two sets of numerals which are interchangeable in some cases but mutually exclusive
in others. For example, native numerals are used with si (the hour, i.e.
ahop
si, "nine o'clock") but Sino-Korean numerals are used with
bun (the
minute, i.e.
gu bun, "nine minutes"). The process of modernization has
resulted in a steady flow of Western words entering the Korean language. Technological
and scientific terms represent the majority of these loanwords, although Western
terms have been introduced into almost every field.