Korean Language

I

Introduction

Korean Language, language spoken by 49 million people in South Korea and 23 million people in North Korea. In addition, more than 5 million Korean emigrants and their descendants speak Korean, primarily in China, Japan, North America, and Russia.

Scholars have not firmly established a historical relationship between Korean and any language family. Korean does not belong to the same language family as Chinese and also differs from the Chinese language in structural characteristics. In grammatical structure, Korean is closest to the Japanese language. The most widely accepted hypothesis is that Korean, like Japanese, is related to the Altaic language group, which includes Mongolian, Turkish, and other languages of Asia. Within that group scholars consider Korean closest to the Tungusic branch, which consists chiefly of languages spoken in Siberia and Mongolia.

Korean is written in Han’gŭl, a simple yet sophisticated script invented in Korea in the mid-1400s. The Korean writing system is known as Han’gŭl (or Hangeul) in general but as Chosŏn’gŭl in North Korea. It is composed of phonetic symbols that accurately represent the distinctive sounds of Korean. Several systems have been developed to represent Korean in the Roman alphabet, which is used for English and other Western languages. These romanization systems enable English-speaking readers to approximate Korean pronunciation. This article uses the common McCune-Reischauer system of romanization.

II

Letters and Writing

Korean is the only language to have a true alphabet completely native to East Asia. In a true alphabet, each character corresponds to a phoneme (a basic sound unit that represents a vowel, a consonant, or a vowel-like consonant called a glide). In Japanese each character corresponds to a syllable; in Chinese, each character corresponds to a word or a morpheme (the smallest language unit that carries an independent meaning).

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Han’gŭl has many characteristics not found in any other alphabet. For example, in Han’gŭl, letters are assembled in blocks to form syllables. Instead of being strung together in a line, characters appear above or below one another as well as side by side, as in the Korean word for Han’gŭl:

This word is made up of the letters:

Perhaps the most unusual characteristic of Han’gŭl is that it did not evolve over centuries as most alphabets did. King Sejong of Korea invented it and introduced it to the country in 1446.

Han’gŭl also differs from all other alphabets because the letter shapes are not random designs but are constructed to represent various characteristics of the Korean sound system. For example, Han’gŭl has two clearly recognizable kinds of graphic shapes for consonants and vowels. Consonant letters were originally constructed from simpler, basic elements, which schematically represented specific characteristics shared by a group of sounds articulated at the same place in the mouth. Thus, the sounds n, t, t’, tt, and r/l, which are produced by placing the tongue on the ridge above and behind the teeth, are represented by letters that include the basic symbol that shows the tongue in that position, like n:

The letters for Han’gŭl vowels are made up of the three basic symbols in East Asian cosmology: a dot (·) representing Heaven, a horizontal line (—) representing Earth, and a vertical line (|) representing a human being. Not long after the invention of the Korean alphabet, the dot was replaced by a short line, possibly for ease of calligraphy done by brush.

For centuries, Koreans combined the syllables into sentences without spaces to separate words, and they wrote sentences vertically, starting from the top right-hand corner of the page. Spaces between words began to appear in 1896. In the mid-20th century, Western-style writing in horizontal lines, starting from the top left and using Western-style punctuation marks, became the norm in North Korea and gained favor in South Korea.

III

Sound System

Korean has 19 distinct consonants, 10 vowels, and 2 glides, w and y. The Korean consonants, in alphabetic order as observed in South Korean dictionaries (represented here in romanization), are k, kk, n, t, tt, l, m, p, pp, s, ss, ng, ch, tch, ch’, k’, t’, p’, and h. The vowels are a, ae, ŏ, e, o, ö, u, ü, ŭ, and i. In North Korea the order is slightly different, and complex letter shapes such as geminate consonants and the vowels ae, e, and ü are grouped after all the basic letters.

In most languages, stops (consonants produced by blocking the passage of air through the mouth) are categorized as either voiced (produced with vibrating vocal cords) or not. For example, in English, the voiceless stops p, t, and k contrast with the voiced stops b, d, and g. Korean is unusual in that while there is no voiceless-voiced distinction, there is a three-way contrast in stops. That is, Korean stops, which are all voiceless, can be lax (p, t, ch, k), tense (pp, tt, tch, kk), or heavily aspirated (p’, t’, ch’, k’). Tense consonants are produced by tightly constricting the vocal cords; the heavily aspirated consonants are produced by widely opening them. Lax stops are gently articulated with the vocal cords slightly open. Lax stops can become voiced only under certain environments, that is, between voiced sounds. For example, the word mi-kuk (meaning “America [beautiful country]”) is pronounced as miguk, although native Korean speakers do not know that kuk and guk contrast, just as most native English speakers do not know the p in peak and the p in speak are pronounced differently.

In Korean, consonants at the end of a syllable retain the oral contact after articulation, unless they are followed by a vowel. The vowel sound is necessary to distinguish one consonant from another. Koreans may carry the linguistic feature over when speaking English. For example, a native Korean speaker might pronounce the English word set as set’ŭ or pinch as p’inch’i. Not releasing consonants at the end of a syllable causes as many as nine different phonemes (t, t’, tt, ch, ch’, tch, s, ss, h) to become indistinguishable, all being pronounced as an unreleased t. Vowel length, which played a significant role in the language variety of Seoul, South Korea, until recently, is rapidly fading out, especially because modern Korean spelling does not mark vowel length. Thus, younger Korean speakers might have difficulty in distinguishing between the two English words keen and kin, which contrast in vowel length. And today, only some dialects, mainly on the east coast of Korea, maintain distinctive pitch accents, sometimes called tones (high, low).

Korean is rich in sound symbolism (a set of sounds having specific meanings). For example, the gently pronounced voiceless consonant k in the word kamkam (meaning “dark, unclear, faraway looking”) can be replaced by strongly aspirated or tense consonants to change the connotation of the word, although all of them will have the basic meaning that has to do with darkness. Strongly aspirated consonants, such as p’, t’, and k’, carry rough, heavy, and strong meanings, as in the word k’amk’am (meaning “spooky and desolately dark”). These consonants are pronounced with widely open vocal cords. Pronounced with the vocal cords tense and almost touching each other, the consonants pp, tt, and kk carry meanings of tight, compact, and dense, as in the word kkamkkam (meaning “pitch-dark”). Korean vowels are considered either dark (Yin) or bright (Yang). Yang vowels (o, a, oe, ae) symbolize something bright, light, small, or cheerful, in contrast with dark Yin vowels (u, ŏ, wi, e). For example, the words kkogijak and kkugijŏk both mean “crumpling,” but the former has the Yang meaning while the latter has the Yin one. Two vowels, i and ŭ, are neutral.

IV

Words

Before Han’gŭl was invented—and for many years afterward—Koreans wrote their language using Chinese characters. In the process they borrowed heavily from Literary Chinese, just as English has borrowed from Literary Latin. Today, many technical and literary words contain roots borrowed from Chinese, as do about 10 percent of Korean’s basic nouns. Many of these nouns turn into verbs with the addition of the suffix (word ending) ha (meaning “do”). As roots borrowed from Chinese continue to be used in forming new words, it is hard to tell exactly what percentage of the total Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin. In recent years, there have been purification movements, especially in North Korea, to drive all foreign elements out of the Korean language, including Chinese words and characters.

Korean is an agglutinative language—that is, it forms words by combining simple words or word components without alteration. Korean creates words by adding suffixes to a word stem (basic part of a word). Suffixes attached to a verb stem indicate things such as verb tense (past, present, or future), verb aspect (an action complete, repeated, or continuing), and honorification (marking the relative status of the person addressed or referred to from the speaker’s point of view—such as an elder, a stranger, or a close friend). Suffixes also signify the type of situation (the degree of formality or intimacy). Grammatical markers attached to a noun indicate the noun’s function in the sentence (subject or object) as well as in the discourse (focus, topic).

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