Learn Korean and Speak Korean :- Free Site for Learning Korean Language. Korean alphabet, pronunciation and language. Korean is spoken by about 63 million people in South Korea, North Korea, China, Japan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Russia. The relationship between Korean and other languages is not known for sure, though some linguists believe it to be a member of the Altaic family of languages. Grammatically Korean is very similar to Japanese and about 70% of its vocabulary comes from Chinese. Origins of writing in Korea Chinese writing has been known in Korea for over 2,000 years. It was used widely during the Chinese occupation of northern Korea from 108 BC to 313 AD. The Idu system used a combination of Chinese characters together with special symbols to indicate Korean verb endings and other grammatical markers, and was used to in official and private documents for many centuries. The Korean alphabet was invented in 1444 and promulgated it in 1446 during the reign of King Sejong (r.1418-1450), the fourth king of the Joseon Dynasty.
Notable features of Hangeul The Hangeul alphabet (한글) Vowels (모음/母音) KBS WORLD Radio. Languages - A Guide to Korean - 10 facts, 20 key phrases and the characters. Korean language. Korean (한국어/조선말, see below) is the official language of both North Korea and South Korea, as well as one of the two official languages in China's Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture. About 80 million people speak Korean worldwide. For over a millennium, Koreans wrote with adapted Chinese characters called hanja, complemented by phonetic systems like hyangchal, gugyeol, and idu. In the 15th century, Sejong the Great commissioned a national writing system called Hangul, but it only came into widespread use in the 20th century, because of the yangban aristocracy's preference for hanja.
Historical linguists classify Korean as a language isolate.[3][4][5][6][7][8] The idea that Korean belongs to a putative Altaic language family has been generally discredited.[9] The Korean language is agglutinative in its morphology and SOV in its syntax. History[edit] Korean is descended from Proto-Korean, Old Korean, Middle Korean, and Modern Korean. Names[edit] Classification[edit] Official status[edit] ㄷ. ¼°´ëÇб³ Çѱ¹¾î °ÁÂ.