Interesting facts about the language

Korean is the native language of around 78 million people worldwide. Speakers live predominantly in South Korea and North Korea, but also in China, Japan, India, and the USA. Other larger groups of Koreans can be found in Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Germany. Korean is the official language in South Korea, North Korea, and the Yanbian Autonomous Prefecture, located in the east of the People's Republic of China on the border with North Korea. Korean occupies a special position among the world's languages because linguistics has not yet been able to clearly assign this language to a language family. It is unclear and controversial whether or not Korean should be classified as part of the Altaic language family (which includes Turkish, Kirghiz, Kazakh, and Mongolian). One argument for classifying Korean as part of this language family is that Korean is similar in structure to the Altaic languages. The Altaic languages are all agglutinative languages, and a characteristic of their language structure is that the meaning of a word in a sentence is changed or expanded by adding a suffix after it. Other linguists are investigating Korean and Japanese for their relationship, but have not yet been able to prove this theory. Therefore, many who study this language assume that Korean is an isolated language, unrelated to any other language in the world.

Until the end of the 14th century, all texts in Korea were written in Chinese characters. In the 15th century, King Sejong the Great (who reigned from 1418 to 1450) had his own Korean script developed. The goal of his script revolution was to create a script that was systematic and easy to learn for all of his people. Under his leadership, an alphabet was developed and disseminated that could reproduce all the sounds of the Korean language and all used Chinese loanwords, as well as the sounds of other foreign languages and even natural sounds (such as the chirping of a bird or the sound of the wind). The result of this research and investigation is the Hangeul script (also called Hangul), which is still used in Korea today – albeit in a somewhat modernized form. The Hangeul alphabet consists of fourteen consonants and ten vowels, which are always combined to form syllable blocks. Different basic characters are systematically combined with one another. This system has the advantage that syllables that are pronounced similarly also look similar in writing. The Hangeul script can be written both vertically and horizontally. Both writing styles are used in Korea. The Hangeul script is unique in the world because it is a script whose "inventor" and the date of its creation are known and documented. The scripts of other languages of the world have developed over a long period of time and have been repeatedly modified in small steps by many rulers, scientists and, not least, by their users. In linguistics, these changes can often only be traced over long periods of time and cannot be dated to a specific point in time. The document in which King Sejong decreed that his new script was to be spread throughout the country and taught to the people has been added to the UNESCO list of Memory of the World.

With the language courses from Sprachenlernen24, you will learn Korean as it is spoken in South Korea. The difference between modern South Korean and North Korean is that South Korea has incorporated many English loanwords into its vocabulary, while North Korea has tried to avoid them.