Korean

Korean may refer to:

People and culture

Places

See also

Koreans

The Koreans (Hangul: 한민족; hanja: 韓民族; alternatively Hangul: 조선민족; hanja: 朝鮮民族, see names of Korea) are a historic people based in the Korean Peninsula and Manchuria. In the last century and a half, the 7 million people of the Korean diaspora have spread along the Pacific Rim, especially to China, United States and Japan.

Etymology

South Koreans refer to themselves as Hanguk-in (Hangul: 한국인; hanja: 韓國人), or Hanguk-saram (Hangul: 한국 사람), both of which mean "Korean country people." When referring to members of the Korean diaspora, Koreans often use the term Han-in (Hangul: 한인; hanja: 韓人; literally "Korean people").

North Koreans refer to themselves as Joseon-in (Hangul: 조선인; hanja: 朝鮮人) or Joseon-saram (Hangul: 조선 사람), both of which literally mean "Joseon people". Using similar words, Koreans in China refer to themselves as Chaoxianzu (Chinese: 朝鲜族) in Chinese or Joseonjok (Hangul: 조선족) in Korean, which are cognates that literally mean "Joseon ethnic group".

Ethnic Koreans living in Russia and Central Asia refer to themselves as Koryo-saram (Hangul: 고려 사람; Cyrillic script: Корё сарам), alluding to Goryeo, a Korean dynasty spanning from 918 to 1392.

Korean language

Korean (한국어/조선말, see below) is the official language of both South Korea and North Korea, as well as one of the two official languages in China's Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture. About 80 million people speak Korean worldwide.

Historical linguists classify Korean as a language isolate. The idea that Korean belongs to a putative Altaic language family has been generally discredited. The Korean language is agglutinative in its morphology and SOV in its syntax.

For over a millennium, Korean was written with adapted Chinese characters called hanja, complemented by phonetic systems such as hyangchal, gugyeol, and idu. In the 15th century, Sejong the Great commissioned a national writing system called Hangul, but it did not become a legal script to write Korean until the 20th century when the Japanese government in Korea was established. This happened because of the yangban aristocracy's preference for hanja.

History

Korean is descended from Proto-Korean, Old Korean, Middle Korean, and Modern Korean. Since the Korean War, through 70 year's of seperations North–South differences have developed in standard Korean, including variance in pronunciation, verb inflection, and vocabulary chosen.