Korean language

Korean language, language spoken by more than

75 million people, of whom 48 million live in South TABLE OF CONTENTS
Korea and 24 million in North Korea. There are
Introduction
more than 2 million speakers in China,
approximately 1 million in the United States, and Linguistic history and writing systems
about 500,000 in Japan. Korean is the of cial Linguistic characteristics
language of both South Korea (Republic of Korea)
and North Korea (Democratic People’s Republic of
Korea). The two Koreas differ in minor matters of spelling, alphabetization, and vocabulary
choice (including the names of the letters), but both essentially endorse the uni ed
standards proposed by the Korean Language Society in 1933.

Linguistic history and writing systems

General considerations

While much is known about Middle Korean, the language spoken in the 15th century
(when the script was invented), information about the language before that time is
limited. Several hundred words of early Middle Korean were written with phonograms in
the vocabularies compiled by the Chinese as far back as 1103. A still earlier form of the
language, sometimes called Old Korean, has been inferred from place-names and from
the 25 poems (called hyangga) that were composed as early as the 10th century and
re ect the language of the Silla kingdom. Written with Chinese characters used in various
ways to stand for Korean meanings and sounds, the poems are dif cult to decipher, and
there is no consensus on the interpretation of the content.

Nor is there general agreement on the relationship of Korean to other languages. The
most likely relationships proposed are to Japanese and to the languages of the Altaic
group: Turkic, Mongolian, and especially Tungus (-Manchu-Jurchen).

Writing and transcriptions

When Korean words are cited in English and other languages they are transcribed in a
variety of ways, as can be seen from the spellings seen for a popular Korean surname: I, Yi,
Lee, Li, Ree, Ri, Rhee, Rie, Ni, and so on. For English speakers the most popular
transcription is that of the McCune-Reischauer system, which writes words more or less as
they sound to the American ear. Despite its clumsiness, McCune-Reischauer is the system
used in this description, and following that system the common surname is written Yi; it
sounds like the English name of the letter e. In citing sentences, many linguists prefer the
Yale romanization, which more accurately re ects the Korean orthography and avoids the
need for diacritics to mark vowel distinctions. For a comparison of the two systems, see
the

Table.

The writing system dates from 1443, and for many years it was known as Ŏnmun
‘vernacular script,’ though in South Korea it is now called Hangul (han’gŭl; or Hankul in
the Yale romanization) and in North Korea Chosŏn kŭl(tcha), Chosŏn mun(tcha), or just
Chosŏn mal ‘Korean.’ Very simple symbols are provided for each of the phonemes. Words
can be spelled by putting these symbols one after another, as most writing systems do,
but Koreans have preferred to group the symbols into square blocks like Chinese
characters. The rst element in the block is the initial consonant; if the syllable begins
with a vowel, a small circle serves as a zero initial. What follows, either to the left or below
(or both) is the vowel nucleus, which may be simple or complex (originally a diphthong or
triphthong). An optional nal element at the bottom (called patch’im) writes a nal
consonant or a cluster of two consonants. The 15th-century script had a few additional
consonant letters that became obsolete in the following centuries and an additional
vowel distinction that survived in the spellings until 1933; that vowel is usually transcribed
as ă. On Cheju Island, where the distinction is maintained, the phoneme is pronounced
[ɔ], very close to the modern Seoul version of the vowel transcribed ŏ, which in many parts
of the country is still pronounced [ə]. That accounts for the rst vowel of the usual spelling
Seoul (= Sŏul), based on a French system of romanization, and for the use of the letter e to
write ŏ in the Yale system.

The earlier language had a distinctive musical accent. In the far south and the northeast,
the accent is still maintained as distinctions of pitch, vowel length, or a combination of the
two. In the 15th century, low-pitched syllables were left unmarked but a dot was placed to
the left of the high-pitched syllables and a double dot (like a colon) was put beside
syllables that rose from low to high. The rising accent was maintained as vowel length in
central Korea after the other distinctions eroded, but it, too, is vanishing in modern Seoul,
even in initial syllables, where it has persisted longest. Like French, Seoul Korean no longer
uses accent to distinguish words. The few apparent exceptions are due to intonation: nu-
ga wassŏ (spoken with a rising pitch) ‘Did someone come?’, nu-ga wassŏ (spoken with a
falling pitch) ‘Who came?’.

Koreans began putting spaces between words in 1896. As in English, judgment varies on
what constitutes a word rather than a phrase. Earlier, Koreans wrote syllables as distinct
blocks but failed to separate words. That was the Chinese tradition, which is still alive in
Japan, where the mixture of kanji (Chinese characters) and kana (syllabic symbols based
on kanji) helps the eye detect phrase breaks. The Chinese comma and period (a hollow
dot) are commonly used, and modern punctuation marks have been taken from English.

Korean borrowed many words from Classical Chinese, including most technical terms and
about 10 percent of the basic nouns, such as san ‘mountain’ and kang ‘river.’ The
borrowed words are sometimes written in Chinese characters, though that practice is
increasingly avoided except when the characters are used as aids in explaining technical
terms.

Korean spelling is complicated. Words are usually written morphophonemically rather

than phonemically, so that a given element is seen in a constant form, even though its
pronunciation may vary when it is joined with other elements. For example, the word for
‘price’ is always spelled kaps though it is pronounced /kap/ in isolation and /kam/ in kaps-
man ‘just the price.’ See below Assimilations. From the 15th century on there has been a
steady trend toward ignoring predictable alternants.

Digraphs and separators

All transcriptions of Korean include digraphs of one kind or another and use separators to
distinguish a string of two letters in their separate values from their single value as a
digraph. When no other mark (such as a hyphen or space) is in order, the McCune-
Reischauer system uses the apostrophe to distinguish such pairs as hangŏ (= hang-ŏ)
‘resistance’ and han’gŏ (= han-gŏ, usually pronounced as if hang-gŏ) ‘a cloistered life.’
Linguistic characteristics
Vowels

The vowel nucleus consists of a simple vowel, which may be preceded by y or w. The
McCune-Reischauer romanization puts a breve (˘) over the letters u and o to distinguish
the originally unrounded vowels [ɨ] and [ə] (= Seoul [ɔ]) from their rounded counterparts
[u] and [o]. (Unrounded vowels are said with a tight smile; rounded vowels with pursed
lips.) The Yale romanization uses the letter u for the unrounded [ɨ] and writes [u] as wu but
encourages the omission of the w after p, ph (= p’), pp, m, and y, where the rounding has
become nondistinctive in modern Korean. The front vowels transcribed as e = [e], and ae =
[ε] or [æ] were originally diphthongs, as shown by the complex Hangul symbols re ected
in the ey and ay of the Yale romanization. The vowel ae is no longer kept distinct from e in
southern Korea and the distinction is virtually lost in modern Seoul, though it is
maintained in the spellings. Another old diphthong, originally [oy], is transcribed oe (Yale
oy) and sometimes pronounced as a front rounded vowel [ö], though it commonly sounds
the same as the less common diphthong we, which is often simpli ed to just e; the
surname Ch’oe may be said as if spelled Ch’we or Ch’e. The old diphthong [uy] became
modern wi [wi] and is so pronounced by most speakers, but some people use a front
rounded vowel [ü]. The old diphthong ŭi [ɨy], into which ăe [əy] merged, was largely
replaced by [ɨ] (initially) or [i], but it is maintained in spelling certain words of Chinese
origin such as ŭiŭi [ɨ:i] ‘meaning’ and in writing the particle -ŭi [e] ‘of’ (but not the
homonymous particle -e ‘to’ or ‘in’). The older version as a diphthong has regained
popularity in modern Seoul in words such as ŭija ‘chair’ (said as three syllables), probably
as a result of “reading” pronunciations.

Consonants
When they are initial, the simple stops p, t, and k are pronounced much as in English (pie,
tie, kite), with light aspiration. When nal, they are cut off with no release, as in one way of
saying English “Up! Out! Back!”. The affricate ch occurs in the word chip ‘house,’ which is
pronounced with a sound intermediate between English chip and cheap; some speakers,
especially before the back vowels, pronounce the affricate as a nonpalatalized [ts], and
that is thought to have been its 15th-century pronunciation. Between voiced sounds
(which include the vowels and y, w, m, n, ng, l, and r), the stops acquire voicing, and that
feature is noted in the McCune-Reischauer romanization (but not in the Hangul spelling
or the Yale romanization): ip ‘mouth’ but ib-e ‘in the mouth,’ mat ‘ rstborn’ but mad-adŭl
‘eldest son,’ ak ‘evil’ but ag-in ‘evil person.’ Final -p sometimes represents a basic p’ (ap
‘front’ but ap’-e ‘in front’) or ps [pss] (kap ‘price’ but kaps-ŭl ‘the price [as object]’). A nal t
sometimes represents a basic t’ (mit ‘bottom’ but mit’-e ‘at the bottom’), j (nat ‘daytime’
but naj-e ‘in the daytime’), or ch’ (kkot ‘ ower’ but kkoch’-ida ‘it’s a ower’); more often,
however, a nal t represents a basic s (ot ‘garment’ but os-ŭl ‘the garment [as object]’).
Some speakers regularize the basic forms of nouns (but not verb stems) so that for them
the non nal t always represents basic s; they say pas-ey for the standard pat’-ey ‘in the
eld.’ The single liquid phoneme has two predictable pronunciations: a clear (and
sometimes palatalized) lateral [l] when it is at the end of a syllable or doubled [-l:l-],
otherwise (and also before h) the ap [r]. The McCune-Reischauer transcription writes l or r
in accordance with the pronunciation, which is ignored by the Hangul spelling and the
Yale romanization: il ‘one’ but ir-wŏn ‘one Wŏn,’ nal ‘day’ and nal-lo ‘by the day’ but nar-e
‘on the day.’ There are problems involving initial r and n that are re ected in newspaper
references to “President Roh (pronounced No).” The Korean language borrowed some
Chinese words beginning with a liquid ([l] in Chinese), and Koreans tried to pronounce
them with an r, but they were generally successful only when the element was not initial
in a word; when the liquid was initial they used an n instead. The second syllable of toro
‘street’ is the same element as the rst syllable of nosang ‘on the street’ (which is spelled
with an n- in South Korea but with an r- in North Korea). There is an added complication:
in the south ny- and ni- (whether from original n- or from r-) dropped the nasal, and that
is when the common surname borrowed from Chinese Lĭ became Yi. The name is still
pronounced [ni] in parts of North Korea, though the reading pronunciation [ri] has spread
in P’yŏngyang since 1945. In modern times, loanwords from English, Japanese, and
Russian have brought in an initial [r], and that is usually pronounced as a ap.

Assimilations

The spoken syllables are fairly simple in structure. Each ends either in a vowel or in one of
the voiced consonants p, t, k, m, n, ng, or l. When two syllables are put together, various
changes may take place where they join. When a syllable that ends in a stop is followed by
one that begins with a nasal, the stop assimilates: chip ‘house’ + -man ‘only’ sounds just
like chim ‘burden’ + -man [čimman], and kung-min can mean either ‘the people of the
nation’ (when the rst syllable is kuk- ‘nation’) or ‘the poor people’ (when the rst syllable
is kung- ‘poor’). Hangul spelling distinguishes such pairs by writing the basic forms.
Before a velar (k, k’, kk), the dental n is usually pronounced like the velar ng so that kan’go
‘hardship’ sounds like kanggo ‘stable,’ but that assimilation is ignored in both the spelling
and the transcriptions. Both -n + l- and -l + n- are pronounced like -l + l-, so for the sound [-
l:l-] one must know what is in the word to decide which of the three Hangul spellings to
use.

Aspirated and reinforced consonants

English makes a two-way distinction of voiceless and voiced stops (pip, bib; tat, dad; kick,
gig). In Korean, voicing is automatic, so that [p] and [b] form a single phoneme and are
written with the same Hangul letter. Korean distinguishes two other kinds of obstruents
(stops, or fricatives): heavily aspirated p’, t’, k’, and ch’ and reinforced (tense) pp, tt, kk, and
tch. The standard language also has a tense sibilant ss in contrast with the lax (and
somewhat aspirated) s, but many speakers maintain this distinction only at the beginning
of a word or ignore it entirely, despite the spelling. Both kinds of s are palatalized before i
or y, and the lax s sounds like English sh, so that the Silla kingdom is sometimes referred
to as the Shilla kingdom. (The Yale transcription for this name, Sinla, shows the Hangul
spelling.) The reinforced consonants, now written as geminates (duplicate letters),
probably became distinctive through the reduction of clusters, such as Middle Korean st,
pst, and pt, and in many words the heavily aspirated consonants seem to go back to
earlier clusters with h or k. The clusters, in turn, were reduced from disyllabic strings by
syncope (omitting the vowel). The simple aspirate h is often murmured or dropped
between voiced sounds: si(h)ŏm ‘test,’ annyŏng (h)ase-yo ‘How are you?’ That accounts for
the [r] in words like sir(h)ŏm ‘experiment.’ Before i the velar nasal is often reduced to no
more than nasality: annyŏng (h)i kase-yo ‘Good-bye to you who are leaving’ is usually
pronounced [annyɔĩgas].

Reinforcement

When p, t, k, ch, or s is preceded by a stop, it is automatically pronounced as reinforced

(tense), but that sound feature is ignored both in the Hangul spellings and in the
transcriptions: ip-to ‘the mouth too’ = /iptto/, ot-kwa ‘with the garment’ = /o(t)kkwa/, kuk-
poda ‘than the soup’ = /kukppoda/, hakcha ‘scholar’ = /haktcha/, iksal ‘joke’ = /ikssal/. After
the adnominal ending -(ŭ)l there is reinforcement unless a pause is inserted: pol kot ‘the
place to look’ sounds just like pol kkot ‘the ower to look at,’ but they are spelled and
transcribed differently. Other cases of reinforcement are less predictable and are variously
treated or neglected in spellings and transcriptions. In some cases the reinforcement
goes back to the Middle Korean particle s ‘of.’

Liaison
When a Korean syllable that begins with a vowel is added to a syllable that ends in a
consonant, that coda moves over to ll the empty onset slot of the second syllable: chip
‘house’ + -e ‘to’ is romanized chib-e but pronounced /či-be/, pap ‘rice/meal’ + -ŭl (direct
object) is spelled pab-ŭl but said as /pa-bŭl/, and tong-an ‘interval’ is heard as /to-ŋan/.

Grammar

Korean sentences are very similar to those of Japanese, though the words sound quite
different. Modi ers always precede what they modify. The unmarked order is subject +
indirect object + direct object + predicate. Only the predicate is essential, and other
information may be omitted. Actions are expressed by processive predicates (= verbs),
such as mŏgŏ ‘[someone] eats [it]’ and anja ‘[someone] sits,’ characteristics by descriptive
predicates (= adjectives), such as tŏwŏ ‘[it] is warm’ and cho(h)a ‘[it] is good’ (or ‘I like it’). A
special kind of descriptive, the closely attached copula (linking verb), predicates nouns, as
in ton–i(y)a ‘it’s money’ and ch’a–’ya ‘it’s tea.’ The descriptive predicates can only make
statements or questions, but the processive predicates can also make commands and
suggestions, so that (depending on intonation) anja can mean ‘I sit,’ ‘Will you sit?’, ‘Sit!’, or
‘Let’s sit!’; tŏwŏ means only ‘It’s warm’ or ‘Is it warm?’. The predicate is an in ected form
consisting of a stem + an ending: mŏgŏ consists of the stem mŏk- ‘eat’ and the in nitive
ending -ŏ, which takes the shape -a when the preceding vowel is a or o, as in anja from
anch- ‘sit’ and cho(h)a from choh- ‘be good/liked,’ and also (when the in nitive is
sentence- nal) in the copula i(y)a from the stem i-. A nal particle -yo is often added to
the in nitive to show friendly politeness, as in mŏgŏ-yo and cho(h)a-yo; the copula takes
the shape ie-yo or ’(y)e-yo, as in ton–ie-yo and ch’a–’e-yo. Nouns attach particles to show
their roles in the sentence. The subject is marked by -i after a consonant or -ga after a
vowel (but in the 15th century -y was used), and the direct object is marked by -ŭl after a
consonant or -lŭl after a vowel. These case markers are often omitted or are masked by
particles of focus such as -do and -to ‘also, even,’ used to highlight a word, and -ŭn (after a
consonant) or -nŭn (after a vowel), used to background a topic. The indirect object is
usually marked by (h)ant’e or (less casually) ege, as in ŏmŏni-ga ttar-(h)ant’e ton-ŭl chue
‘The mother gives the daughter money.’

The negative copula expression converts [noun] + i- into [noun]-i/-ga + ani–(i)-, as in ton-i
ani–’ya ‘It isn’t money’ and ch’a-ga ani–’ya ‘It isn’t tea.’ In short sentences verbs and
adjectives can be negated by preposing the adverb an(i), as in an mŏgŏ ‘I won’t eat it,’ but
a more versatile device permits negation of even long sentences by converting the verb to
an in ected form that ends in -ji or -chi (pronounced ch’i), followed by the auxiliary anh-
‘not do/be,’ a contraction from ani ha- (the negative adverb + the dummy verb ha-
‘do/be’): mŏkchi an(h)a ‘I don’t eat it,’ chuji an(h)a ‘I don’t give it,’ choch’i an(h)a ‘It’s no
good.’ Predicates can be conjoined with endings meaning ‘and’ (-go/-ko, -ŏ/-a–sŏ) or ‘but’
(-na/-ŭna, -ji/-chi–man) and subordinated with endings that mean ‘when/if’ (such as -
myŏn/-ŭmyŏn) or ‘even if’ (-ŏ/a–do).

The Korean language also has endings that adnominalize a predicate (make it modify a
following noun), operating in the same manner as an English relative clause: uri-(h)ant’e
ton-ŭl chun saram ‘the people who gave us the money,’ saram-i uri-(h)ant’e chun ton ‘the
money the people gave us,’ saram-i ton-ŭl chun uri ‘we to whom people gave money,’
saram-i uri-(h)ant’e ton-ŭl chun chib-i man(h)a ‘There are many houses where people
gave us money.’ Often the predicate marks the subject as someone special (“you” or “the
teacher”) by inserting the honori c marker -(ŭ)si-, reduced to -(ŭ)sy- before a vowel as in
chusyŏ-yo. There are also ways to mark the predicate for tense and aspect.

The examples given here are all in an informal style, but there are several other styles. The
formal style marks a statement with -(sŭ)mnida, a question with -(sŭ)mnikka, a command
with -(sŭp)sio, and a suggestion with -(sŭ)psida. The forms in the plain/impersonal style
are -da (or processive -(nŭ)nda) for statements, -na or -ni or -(nŭ)n-ya/-ka for questions, -
(ŭ)ra or in nitive + -ra for commands, and -ja/-cha for suggestions. Instead of -ŏ(-yo)
Koreans sometimes use -ji(-yo) to assert the speaker’s involvement.

Samuel E. Martin

CITATION INFORMATION
ARTICLE TITLE: Korean language
WEBSITE NAME: Encyclopaedia Britannica
PUBLISHER: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
DATE PUBLISHED: 14 August 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Korean-language
ACCESS DATE: October 18, 2019