Korean

Where it’s spoken

Korean is the official language of both South Korea and North Korea. Roughly 80 million people speak it as a first language, including major communities in China (notably the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture), Japan, the United States, Canada, Australia, and post-Soviet Central Asia. South Korean popular culture (K-pop, K-drama) has greatly expanded global learner interest.

What it sounds like

Korean distinguishes three series of stops — plain, aspirated, and tense — instead of the voiced/voiceless contrast of many languages. It has a moderate vowel inventory with phonemic length in some dialects. The language uses pitch in the southeastern Gyeongsang dialects but is non-tonal in the standard varieties of Seoul and Pyongyang.

How it’s written

Hangul, commissioned by King Sejong the Great in 1443, is a featural alphabet whose letter shapes reflect the articulatory positions of the sounds they represent. Letters cluster into syllabic blocks. Chinese characters (Hanja) are still used occasionally in academic writing.

History

Korean’s genetic relationship to other languages remains disputed; most linguists consider it an isolate or part of a small Koreanic family with the Jeju language.