Korean
Korean, known in the language itself as Kugo, is the language of the
Korean Peninsula in northeast Asia. In the Democratic People's Republic
of Korea (North Korea) there are 20 million speakers and in the Republic
of Korea (South Korea) there are 42 million speakers. Although classified
as a language isolate, many theories have been proposed to explain the
origin of Korean. The most prominent of these link Korean to the Altaic
languages of central Asia, a family that includes Turkish, Mongolian,
and the Tungusic languages of Siberia. Others argue for the inclusion
of Uralic languages (Hungarian and Finnish) and Japanese in this macro
family. Although not definitively proven, this affiliation is accepted
by most Korean linguists and deemed likely by Western linguists as well.
The competing theory associates Korean with the Dravidian languages of
southern India, or to Austronesian languages. Determining Korean's linguistic
affiliation is complicated by a long history of contact with the Japanese
and Chinese languages. Not surprisingly, Korean shares certain linguistic
features with each of these languages. Officially, there are two standard
varieties of Korean in Korea: the Seoul dialect in South Korea and the
Phyong'yang dialect in North Korea. These dialects are distinguished
and regulated by each country's national language policy. Regional dialects
also exist, some of which are not easily mutually intelligible. Korean
is written in a unique form of writing called Hangul. In the fifteenth
century, King Sejong of the Yi Dynasty commissioned the development of
a phonetically based script for Korean. Until that time, Korean had been
written with Chinese characters, and literacy was restricted to a small,
educated elite. However, Hangul did not manage to fully displace Chinese
script until the nationalistic democratization movement at the end of
the nineteenth century. This movement led to the printing of the first
Hangul newspaper in 1894. Soon after, books and government documents
were also published in Hangul.
Sources:
UCLA Language Materials Project
Information on writing system:
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