Korean

Korean is the official language of North and South Korea, but there are also Korean speakers in China, Japan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Russia, amounting to approximately 70 Million worldwide.

It is interesting to note that Korean has no known relationship with any other language. There are different theories. Most linguists believe it to be a member of the Altaic language family, (such as Mongol, Turkic, Finnish, Hungarian, and Tungusic). But because of its many grammatical similarities to Japanese, and the largest part of its vocabulary coming from Chinese, there are others who believe Korean is distantly related to the Japanese language. However, neither theory has been proven conclusively, to date.

Korean is either written using a mix of the Korean alphabet (Hangul) and Chinese ideograms (Hanja), or Hangul only. Today, most writing is exclusively Hangul.

The Hangul writing system was created in the 15th century by King Sejong the Great. This differs from the writing systems of most other languages in that it was simply invented, rather than evolving over years as is the norm. This could also be the reason why it is considered to be one of the most efficient and logical writing systems in existence.

The Hangul system is organized into syllabic parts, each one consisting of 2 or more jamo (letters), 14 consonants and 10 vowels. Writing Hangul: although normally written from left to right, Hangul can also be written from top to bottom.

An interesting fact about Korean:

The consonants in Hangul were created as representations of the human speaking organs that are needed to pronounce them. This was done to make it easier to speak and recognize them.

In addition, the vowels in Hangul are all based on 3 elements, as follows: man (vertical line), earth (horizontal line), and heaven (dot or short line).

The Korean Alphabet: “Hangul”

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Photo Credits: TU Berlin