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Korean ( South Korean: 한국어, hangugeo; North Korean: 조선말, chosŏnmal) is the native language for about 81 million people, mostly of Korean descent. [a] [2] It is the official and national language of both North Korea and South Korea. The language has notable differences in each of the Koreas, in part owing to different official ...
- Proto-Koreanic
Koreanic is a small language family consisting of the Korean...
- South Korean
The South Korean standard language or Pyojuneo (Korean: 표준어;...
- North Korean
An example of North Korean standard language as spoken by...
- North–South Differences
The Korean language has diverged between North and South...
- Korean Honorifics
The Korean language has a system of honorifics that...
- Defense Language Aptitude Battery
The Defense Language Aptitude Battery (DLAB) is a test used...
- Korean Dialects
A number of Korean dialects (Korean: 한국어의 방언) are spoken on...
- Old Korean
Old Korean (North Korean name: 고대 조선어; South Korean name: 고대...
- Proto-Koreanic
- Overview
- General considerations
- Writing and transcriptions
- Digraphs and separators
Korean language, language spoken by more than 75 million people, of whom 48 million live in South Korea and 24 million in North Korea. There are more than 2 million speakers in China, approximately 1 million in the United States, and about 500,000 in Japan. Korean is the official language of both South Korea (Republic of Korea) and North Korea (Dem...
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 reflect the language of the Silla kingdom. Written with Chinese characters used in various ways to stand for Korean meanings and sounds, the poems are difficult 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).
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 reflects the Korean orthography and avoids the need for diacritics to mark vowel distinctions. For a comparison of the two systems, see the Click Here to see full-size tableTable.
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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 first 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 final element at the bottom (called patch’im) writes a final 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 first 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?’.
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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) ‘resi...
- Samuel E. Martin
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Korean is the native language for about 81 million people, mostly of Korean descent. It is the official and national language of both North Korea and South Korea. The language has notable differences in each of the Koreas, in part owing to different official standardizations of the language.
There are approximately 7,000 South Koreans living in France (excludes Korean French adoptees), and 2,000 French people living in South Korea. [11] One of the most prominent Korean scholars of French literature was Kim Bung-gu (1922~ 1991). The French government describes its relations with South Korea as "excellent".
- Ambassador Yoo Dae-jong
- South Korea Embassy, Paris
French is an official language in 27 countries and is spoken across all continents. [2] French is also one of the most geographically widespread languages in the world, with about 50 countries and territories having it as a de jure or de facto official, administrative, or cultural language. [3]
- Signed French, (français signé)
The Korean Wikipedia (Korean: 한국어 위키백과, romanized: Han-gugeo Wiki Baekgwa) is the Korean language edition of Wikipedia. It was founded on 11 October 2002 and reached ten thousand articles on 4 June 2005. As of May 2024, it is the 23rd largest Wikipedia, with 667,069 articles and 2,064 active users.
Feb 2, 2024 · Pyojuneo (표준어)/Gyeonggi (경기) Pyojuneo, sometimes called Seoulmal (서울말) and Gyeonggido Pyojuneo (경기도 표준어), or Standard Korean, is based on the dialect of the Gyeonggi province. Gyeonggi province is also where the capital, Seoul, is located. This is the variety that’s learned in textbooks and school courses, as well ...
