Chinese Culture >> Asian Culture >> Korean Language
Language of Korea
The Korean language is spoken by the entire population of
North and South Korea, although there are certain differences between the Korean
dialect spoken in the north and the one spoken in the south. The Korean language
is also used in the autonomous region of Yanbian which is in the southern
province of Heilongjiang in China.
Approximately 78 million people speak Korean, including communities of
immigrants now living in the former Soviet Union, Australia, Canada, United
States, Brazil, Japan, United Kingdom, as well as the Philippines.
The so called denomination of the language varies between both Koreas. In South
Korea it is usually called Hangugeo or Hangungmal. Within an official context
the name it is given is gugeo which means "language of the country. Colloquially
speaking it is also referred to as urimal that literally means "our language."
North Korean typically refer to the Korean language as Chos nmal although it is
also called urimal. The standard of North Korea is based on the way it is spoken
in the capital P'yngyang while in the south the standard is the way it is spoken
in Seoul. The differences between these two forms of the Korean language does
not make it impossible for speakers of either group to communicate with each
other because the differences are more or less equivalent to the Spanish spoken
in Spain and the Spanish spoken in Latin America.
The origen of the Korean language is not yet clear. Some linguists say it
belongs to the group of the Altaican languages whilst others put it in the same
group with the Japanese language in one single group: Korean-Japanese.
Since neither of these two views have been demonstrated decisively, those who do
study the language prefer to refer to the Korean language as a language
significantly distinct from the aforementioned groups. From a morphological
point of view, the Korean language uses agglutination which is the process of
adding affixes to the base of a word. Korean maintains a grammatical syntax
whose base is Subject-Object-Verb. Japanese, Vietnamese, and the Korean
languages are influenced heavily by the Chinese language.
The system utilized for writing Korean is known as Hangeul, and it is at the
same time an alphabetical and phonetic system. It is quite common to use the
vocabularies that come either directly or indirectly from the Chinese language.
About the Author:
Jacob Lumbroso is a world traveler and an enthusiast for foreign languages, history, and foreign cultures. He writes articles on history and languages for http://www.ultimatelanguagestore.com and has used Pimsleur courses to learn various languages.