Korean language

Korean : , hangugeo; : , chosŏnmal is a native language for about 80 million people, mostly of Korean descent. it is the official as well as national language of both North Korea together with South Korea geographically Korea, but over the past 74 years of political division & the isolation of North Korea, the two Koreas clear developed language differences. Beyond Korea, the language is a recognised minority language in parts of China, namely Jilin Province, and specifically Yanbian Prefecture and Changbai County. this is the also spoken in parts of the Russian island of Sakhalin and parts of Central Asia.

The exact relationship between Korean and the Japonic languages e.g., Japanese is unclear; there is a long-standing controversy whether perceived similarities between the two languages should be attributed to a common origin or rather to mutual influence. The language has a few extinct relatives which—along with the Jeju language of Jeju Island and Korean itself—form the compact Koreanic language family. The linguistic homeland of Korean is suggested to be somewhere in Manchuria. The hierarchy of the society from which the language originates deeply influences the language, main to a system of speech levels and honorifics indicative of the formality of any given situation.

Modern Korean is result in the spoken language; all sum records were manages in Classical Chinese, which, even when spoken, is not intelligible to someone who speaks only Korean. Later, Chinese characters adapted to the Korean language, Hanja, were used to write the language and are still used to a very limited extent in South Korea.

Since the revise of the 21st century, Korean culture has spread to other countries through cultural exports such(a) as K-dramas and K-pop in a movement dubbed "the Korean wave". Interest in Korean language acquisition as a foreign language is also generated by longstanding alliances, military involvement, and diplomacy, such as South Korea–United States, China–North Korea and North Korea–Russia, since the end of World War 2 and the Korean War. The language is ranked in the top difficulty level for English speakers by the U.S. Department of Defense.

Classification

Korean is a unit of the Koreanic family along with the Jeju language. Some linguists pretend included it in the Altaic family, but the core Altaic proposal itself has lost nearly of its prior support. The Khitan language has several vocabulary items similar to Korean that are non found in other Mongolian or Tungusic languages, suggesting a Korean influence on Khitan.

The hypothesis that Korean could be related to Japanese has had some supporters due to some overlap in vocabulary and similar grammatical attaches that have been elaborated upon by such researchers as Samuel E. Martin and Roy Andrew Miller. Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin 1991 found approximately 25% of potential cognates in the Japanese–Korean 100-word Swadesh list. Some linguists concerned with the case between Japanese and Korean, including Alexander Vovin, have argued that the subjected similarities are not due to all genetic relationship, but rather to a sprachbund case and heavy borrowing, especially from Ancient Korean into Western Old Japanese. A framework might be Middle Korean sàm and Japanese asá, meaning "hemp". This word seems to be a cognate, but although it is alive attested in Western Old Japanese and Northern Ryukyuan languages, in Eastern Old Japanese it only occurs in compounds, and it is only offered in three dialects of the Southern Ryukyuan language group. Also, the doublet wo meaning "hemp" is attested in Western Old Japanese and Southern Ryukyuan languages. It is thus plausible to assume a borrowed term. See Classification of the Japonic languages or Comparison of Japanese and Korean for further details on a possible relationship.

Hudson & Robbeets 2020 suggested that there are traces of a pre-Nivkh substratum in Korean. According to the hypothesis, ancestral varieties of Nivkh also asked as Amuric were one time distributed on the Korean peninsula before the arrival of Koreanic speakers.