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Korean Language Facts and History: Republic of The Philippines

The document discusses the Korean language. It notes that Korean is spoken by over 72 million people primarily on the Korean peninsula and in countries like China, the United States, and Japan. The Korean language uses the Hangul alphabet, which was created under King Sejong and consists of symbols that represent syllables rather than individual letters. While Korean grammar reflects relationships between speakers, the language is relatively homogeneous across its dialects within South Korea and single dialect in North Korea.

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John Dilao
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142 views2 pages

Korean Language Facts and History: Republic of The Philippines

The document discusses the Korean language. It notes that Korean is spoken by over 72 million people primarily on the Korean peninsula and in countries like China, the United States, and Japan. The Korean language uses the Hangul alphabet, which was created under King Sejong and consists of symbols that represent syllables rather than individual letters. While Korean grammar reflects relationships between speakers, the language is relatively homogeneous across its dialects within South Korea and single dialect in North Korea.

Uploaded by

John Dilao
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Republic of the Philippines

CEBU TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY


DAANBANTAYAN CAMPUS
SAN REMIGIO EXTENSION
Tambongon San Remigio, Cebu, Philippines

Korean Language Facts and History


Korean is spoken by more than 72 million people living on the Korean
peninsula. Although it differs slightly in spelling, alphabet, and
vocabulary between the two regions, Korean is the official language of
both South Korea and North Korea. Outside of the Korean peninsula,
there are about two million people in China who speak Korean as their
first language, another two million in the United States, 700,000 in
Japan, and 500,000 in the Russian regions of Kazakhstan and
Uzbekistan.
The Korean language has five major dialects in South Korea and one in
North Korea. Despite the geographical and socio-political dialect
differences, Korean is relatively homogeneous, being mutually
understandable among speakers from different areas
Originally written using “Hanja” (Chinese characters), Korean is now
mainly spelled in “Hangul”, the Korean alphabet. “Hangul” consists of 24
letters – 14 consonants and 10 vowels – that are written in blocks of 2 to
5 characters. Unlike the Chinese writing system (including Japanese
“Kanji”), “Hangul” is not an ideographic system. The shapes of the
individual “Hangul” letters were designed to model the physical
morphology of the tongue, palate and teeth. Up to five letters join to form
a syllabic unit.
Like in other Asian languages, the relationship between a speaker or
writer and his or her subject and audience is paramount in Korean, and
the grammar reflects this. The relationship between the speaker/writer
and subject is reflected in honorifics, while that between speaker/writer
and audience is reflected in speech level. If one is unsure as to how to
use the language appropriately it is advisable to refer to professional
Korean language services.
When talking about someone superior in status, a speaker or writer has
to use special nouns or verb endings to indicate the subject’s superiority.
Generally, someone is superior in status if he/she is an older distant
relative (grandparent’s sibling, older sibling’s spouse, etc.), a stranger of
roughly equal or greater age, an employer, teacher or a customer.
Someone is equal or inferior in status if he/she is a close relative
(grandparent, parent, spouse, or sibling), student, employee, etc. On
rare occasions (like when someone wants to pick a fight), a speaker
might talk to a superior or stranger in a way normally only used for, say,
animals. But no one would do this without seriously considering the
consequences to their physical safety first…
There is a consensus among linguists that Korean is a member of the
Altaic family of languages, which originated in northern Asia and
includes the Mongol, Turkic, Finnish, Hungarian, and Tungusic (Manchu)
languages. Despite the fact that Korean and Japanese have some
similar grammatical structures, a historical relationship between the two
languages has not been established so far.
The Korean language may be written using a mixture of Chinese
ideograms (“Hanja”) and a native Korean alphabet known as “Hangul”,
or in “Hangul” alone, much as in a more limited way Indo-European
languages sometimes write numbers using Arabic symbols and at other
times spell numbers out in their own alphabets or in some combination
of the two forms.
Because of its greater variety of sounds, Korean does not have the
problem of the Japanese written language, which some experts have
argued needs to retain a sizable inventory of Chinese characters to
distinguish a large number of potentially ambiguous sounds.
Although the Korean and Chinese languages are not related in terms of
grammatical structure, more than 50 percent of all Korean vocabulary is
derived from Chinese loanwords, a reflection of the cultural dominance
of China over 2 millennia.
Large numbers of Chinese character compounds coined in Japan in the
nineteenth or twentieth century’s to translate modern Western scientific,
technical, and political vocabulary came into use in Korea during the
colonial period. Post-1945 United States influence has been reflected in
a number of English words that have been absorbed into Korean. Unlike
Chinese, Korean does not encompass dialects that are mutually
unintelligible. There are, however, regional variations both in vocabulary
and pronunciation.

e Korean alphabet was a project promoted by S

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