한국어·韓國語

A Description of the Korean Language

What follows is an opinionated—as well as descriptively accurate (to the best of my ability)—description of the Korean language. The Korean language?! What about muh dialects? No, I mean the Korean language as standardized in textbooks, broadcasted as video, taught in schools, and spoken by nice (착한) city people. That's what I've mainly been exposed to and what you will most likely encounter in classes and learning materials, so that is what will be discussed here.

Click here to return to my top-level Korean page.

The Koreas

한국이란 무엇 인가?
What is this 'Korea' you speak of?

The Korean peninsula sticks out of China (view a political map). South Korea is like an "island" because one does not simply travel through North Korea—while South Korea has many large airports with frequent flights to and from the Western world at large, travel to and from North Korea is strictly controlled.

The Koreas occupy an interesting position on the 21st century geopolitical stage. From an American perspective, the Koreas neighbor two major world powers—China and Russia. South Korea is the land of K-pop and K-drama, mass entertainment pumped through Southern California to the world at large—and engine for selling cosmetics, clothing, and more. North Korea is a land shrouded in mystery, often used as a foil to the free Western world.

In South Korea, there is a lot of English study—visiting Korean websites for language-related topics, you will definitely run into lots of ads for English-learning products and services. To a lesser extent, you may run into Chinese and Japanese materials. Interest in studying older Korean things often means going back to classical Chinese. Studying this for a Korean is comparable to studying Greek/Latin for an English speaker—it probably will sound kind of esoteric or academic to most people.

Native Korean Vocabulary

Native Korean words make use of more complex sound patterns than the vocabulary borrowed from Japan and China (see "The Sino-Korean Lexicon" below). Some examples:

• 닭 talk "chicken"—the final "l" is sometimes pronounced, sometimes not, depending how this word is used (the phonetic environment of the word).
• 깨닫다 kkaytat-ta "understand"—this word makes use of a Korean stressed consonant sound 'kk'; can be very tricky to hear and pronounce for second language learners. This is different from doubled-consonants in languages like Latin and Italian!
• 좋다 coh-ta "good"—this word belongs to a class of adjectives, which kinda act like verbs. Only native Korean adjectives are members of this (grammatical) class. Japanese likewise has native adjectives that act "verb-like".

Many Native Korean vocabulary pertains to common, every-day things (e.g. stuff that may appear on the Swadesh list, used for comparative linguistics).

As in Japanese, native words are often associated with Chinese characters 한자 (漢字) hanca. For instance, the word for "garlic" in Korean is 마늘 manul (native) but it is associated with the Chinese character 蒜 which is pronounced 산 san in Sino-Korean compounds. A hanja dictionary will have this information.

Many native Korean words are multi-syllabic—often they are longer than single-syllable Chinese morphemes, which are often compounded into bimorphemic words.

The Sino-Korean Lexicon

Many words borrowed from Chinese characters entered Korean through the Japanese language. In broad strokes, this is because Japan had a nationalization movement and chose to adapt Western technology first among the (modern) East Asian nations. Thus Japan got a lots of widespread Western learning first. Korea and China, already in the "Sinosphere" of cultural influence (which I define by using a lot of Chinese characters), borrowed many words from Japan.

By count, these words make up the bulk of the Korean lexicon as they are used for many names of things (abstract, concrete) and actions. Whereas native Korean words are used as the "grammatical glue" bringing the Korean language together, the Sino-Korean lexicon is built off a repository of morphemes (Chinese characters) that get glued together in near endless combinations. Some examples (periods separate pronunciations of characters):

• 학생 (學生) hak.sayng "student"
• 학교 (學校) hak.kyo "school"
• 학급 (學級) hak.kup "class level" (e.g. 5th grade)

Policy has oscillated in both South and North Korea with respect to the whether or not Chinese characters are used and taught. In the South, they are used less and less except maybe in certain academic circles. The North has all-but banished them from public life, I believe.

Note: If you are already familiar with Japanese or Chinese, learning Korean vocabulary will be a lot easier. Shared Chinese roots is like shared Latin/Greek roots across the European languages. Knowing English is also helpful for learning Korean because many words are borrowed from English and Korean media often features English (much less so in North Korea, of course).

English, other foreign borrowings

The language of South Korea has much more English influence, compared with North Korea. When new words, there is sometimes confusion about transliteration (representing a word in a new script)—this is also a problem in Japanese, where multiple variants of spelling may exist for some English word. Some examples:

• 코로나바이러스 kholona-bairesu "Coronavirus"
• 프로그램 phulogulaym "Progam"
• 마스크 masukhu "Mask"

I hear that North Korea has some borrowings from Russia (Soviet connection). I'll add some of those examples if I find them.

Phonology

Compared with European languages like English, Korean only allows relatively simple syllable structure, usually of the form CV(C)—a consonant followed by a vowel with an optional final consonant. Korean has more vowels than Spanish (5), but less than English (10+?). Korean doesn't have any super prominent features, like French's nasal vowels everywhere or Russian's palatalization phenomena. In this sense, it is a very "normal" sounding language. South Korean (Seoul) intonation has been described as sounding like complaining in English.

You may have heard that you can "learn to read" Korean very quickly. This is kinda true in the sense that there is a relatively direct mapping between the way words are written and how they are pronounced. However there are many "rules" governing how different combinations of letters are pronounced.

For example, many sounds are "nasalized" when next to nasal sounds like 'n', 'm', and 'ng' (linguists call this "nasal assimilation"). The word 한국말 hankwuk-mal "Korean speech" is pronounced more like 한궁말 hankwung-mal, with the final 'k' in 한국 hankwuk "Korea" becoming like 'ng' because it is next to an 'm'.

Comparable processes exist in all languages. For instance, in French there is liaison which leads words to be pronounced differently depending where they appear in sentences. With Korean, it is exactly like this, only the specifics of these processes are different and Korean draws from a different set of "base" sound categories. Learning to read any other language, even if they use some variety of the Latin alphabet as English does, will involve learning new rules for pronouncing letters and combinations of letters. In this sense, I think that the "easiness" of learning to read Korean is greatly exaggerated though certain Korean writing looks "very foreign" and is easier to learn to read than languages like Arabic (which doesn't mark short vowels), Chinese/Japanese (needs no explanation), or an Indic language which will have many more complex consonant combinations.

Morphology

Morphology is the study of how the form of words change (depending where those words are used). Korean morphology is much richer for native Korean words compared with Sino-Korean or other loan words. Native Korean verbs and adjectives conjugate, some irregularly, but all-in-all pretty nice to learn compared to the fusional morphology found in the European languages (among others).

The form of Sino-Korean and foreign loan words tend to retain the same form wherever they are found, with native Korean grammatical elements, such as the verb 하다 ha-ta, doing all the heavy grammatical lifting.

Korean does something that is kinda like "case marking" in languages like German and Russian. Particles are affixed to the end of words to indicate how they are used in sentences. For example...

• 커피가 있어요. Khephi-ka isseyo. (I) have coffee.
• 커피를 마셨어요. Khephi-lul masyesseyo. (I) drank coffee.
• 커피로 죽었어요. Khephi-lo cwukesseyo. (I) died by coffee.

Often, these particles can be ommitted. Note, that grammarians studying foreign languages often use "particle" or other similar not-so-descriptive terms to refer to elements that don't readily correspond to stuff in Greek or Latin grammar, from which the West inherited much of its grammatical traditions.

Syntax

Verbs nearly always appear at the end of sentences. The word order of Korean will be intuitive to people who have studied Japanese, Hindi, or other "object-verb" (OV) languages.

Note that what is called a "verb" in Korean may be used to express many meanings expressed with other grammatical categories in other languages. Consider: in English, I can say "the book is red". Here, we have is which may be called a verb—a conjugation of "to be" (more precisely, it may be identified as a copula). In Korean, one might say something along the lines of "car-TOPIC red" 자동차는 빨갛다. catongcha-nun ppalkahta.

Korean sentences will often end with some kind of "conjugational endings" that involves combining more than one verb. This can be compared to "helper/auxiliary verbs" in English—e.g. "I could have gone to the event". In Korean I might say, "Event-to go-FUTURE able was"이벤트에 갈 수 있었어요. ibenthu-ey kal swu issesseyo.

As it is often used on the Internet, in books, and other modern publications, Korean is very much like English. Korean uses white space in its writing and consequently people have a fairly robust consensus on what constitutes a "word". In the past, Korean was written top to bottom in columns, following Chinese tradition. This practice is practically entirely abandoned; Korean nearly always appears flowing horizontally, left to right.

Crop Circle Conspiracy Theories

Searching for information on hangul, the Korean writing system, you are bound to come across all sorts of click bait about how Korean writing is somehow "scientific". Let me spell out plainly what is cool about Korean writing and what is not.

The Korean writing system largely corresponds to Korean phonology (see above if you skipped ahead!), meaning how speakers think of their language. Note that there is something of a "chicken and egg" problem here—is it that Korean speakers analyze their language in a particular way because of hangul or was hangul designed to match speaker intuitions? In any case, hangul orthography ("spelling system") is relatively consistent and the pronunciations of words are more-or-less readily derivable from how they are spelled (some nerds will tell you Korean is tonal, similar to Japanese, and that this information is not represented in the orthography).

Korean does not have upper and lower-case letters. However, modern typographical practices like using bolding, italics, and different font faces entirely are commonly employed in Korean publications.

The further you go back towards the 20th century, the more "Japanese-like" conventions you will find. Moving forward through the 21st century, Korean is gravitating around increasingly American-English like ways of doing writing. Translated foreign works are a popular reading genre in Korea, especially those from English and Japanese.

It should be noted that pretty much all South Koreans receive English language education over many years of schooling. So, while you cannot expect an average South Korean to be able to speak English fluently, you can expect them to be familiar with the Latin alphabet and many English words, especially terms they may have seen through imported products (i.e. product names that use English words).