Korean: a short portrait

Korean belongs to a family of its own, called Koreanic. Its only relative is the language of Jeju Island, off the south coast, which many linguists now count as a separate language. For a long time Korean was grouped with Turkish and Mongolian, and it has often been compared with Japanese, whose grammar is strikingly similar. None of these links has been proven.

Like Japanese, Korean took a great many words from Chinese over two thousand years of contact — by common estimates more than half the entries of a large dictionary. These Sino-Korean words sit beside the native ones much as Latin and French words sit beside Anglo-Saxon ones in English: native 나라 and Sino-Korean 국가 both mean “country”, and the second sounds more formal.

In the early centuries AD the peninsula was divided among three kingdoms, and in the seventh century one of them, Silla, united most of it. The language of Silla is usually seen as the main ancestor of today’s Korean. People wrote in Chinese, and where they needed to write Korean they bent Chinese characters to the task, using some for their meaning and some for their sound.

The next kingdom, Goryeo, gave the country its name in English: “Korea” comes from it. Under the Joseon dynasty, which ruled from 1392 until the early twentieth century, King Sejong had the Korean alphabet created. Even so, the educated elite went on writing in classical Chinese for centuries, while Hangul served letters, popular novels and people who had never had the chance to learn thousands of characters.

Only at the end of the nineteenth century did Hangul become the script of official documents. Under Japanese rule from 1910 to 1945 the use of Korean was pushed back more and more, and in the last years it all but disappeared from schools. Since the division of the country, the two states have developed their own standards: the South’s is based on the speech of Seoul, the North’s on that of Pyongyang.

Korean is the language of both Koreas, and North and South understand each other largely without difficulty, much as British and American speakers do. The differences are in vocabulary and spelling. The South borrows freely from English; the North has replaced many foreign words with native coinages. And the North writes some words with an initial r or n that the South drops: the word for labour is 노동 in Seoul and 로동 in Pyongyang.

Large Korean communities live in north-east China, in Japan, in the United States, and in Central Asia, where Koreans from the Russian Far East were deported in 1937. Within South Korea the dialects are clearly audible: the south-east around Busan and Daegu has a rising and falling melody that the rest of the country recognises at once, and the speech of Jeju is so different that mainlanders often cannot follow it.

Before Hangul, writing meant Chinese characters, and learning enough of them took years that ordinary people did not have. King Sejong set out to change that. The new alphabet was completed in 1443 and made public in 1446, in a document whose title means “the correct sounds for teaching the people”. South Korea celebrates Hangul Day on 9 October.

Its design is unusually clever. The basic consonants are drawn after the organs that make them: ㄱ shows the back of the tongue raised to the roof of the mouth, ㄴ the tip of the tongue touching the ridge behind the teeth, ㅁ the closed mouth, ㅅ a tooth, and ㅇ the open throat. A related sound gets an extra stroke, so ㄱ, a g or k, becomes ㅋ, a k with a puff of air. The vowels are built from three elements — a dot for heaven, a flat line for the earth, and an upright line for a person.

The letters are not written in a row but stacked into square blocks, one block per syllable: 한 is h, a and n, and 한글, the name of the script, is two blocks. That is why Korean text looks like Chinese characters from a distance and can be read letter by letter close up. Fourteen consonants and ten vowels are the basic set; an afternoon is enough to learn to read them.

Korean puts spaces between words, as English does, and uses the same full stops and question marks. Chinese characters still turn up in the South — in names, in some newspaper headlines and in older books — but everyday Korean is written entirely in Hangul.

English has only recently begun to borrow from Korean, mostly through food and pop culture: 김치kimchi비빔밥bibimbap불고기bulgogi Hallyu, the “Korean wave”, is the name for the spread of Korean music, films and series around the world.

Korean has borrowed far more than it has lent. Besides the old layer of words from Chinese, modern Korean is full of English: 컴퓨터is a computer버스a bus커피coffee Some borrowings were reshaped on the way: an apartment is 아파트, and a mobile phone is a 핸드폰, from “hand phone”, a word no English speaker would use.

The verb comes at the end, and small endings after each noun say what it is doing in the sentence: 저는 학생이에요, “I am a student”, is literally “I, as for me, student am”. There are no articles, nouns rarely mark the plural, and whatever is clear from the situation — often “I” or “you” — is simply left out.

Respect is built into the grammar. Every sentence is said at a speech level, chosen by who is speaking to whom, and the endings change with it. Age matters, which is why Koreans often ask each other’s age soon after meeting. There are two sets of numbers, one native and one from Chinese, and which one you use depends on what you are counting: hours take the native numbers, minutes the Chinese ones.

The sounds hold two surprises. Korean has three kinds of consonant where English has two — plain, with a puff of air, and tense — so 불 fire, 풀 grass and 뿔 horn are three different words. And letters change their sound when they meet: 국물, broth, is said gungmul.

Short facts to wonder at. One at a time, they also turn up at the end of a practice round — folded away, so they never get in the way.

1. Some Hangul letters picture the mouth: ㄱ (g) shows the tongue touching the back of the mouth, ㅁ (m) the closed lips.
2. Letters are grouped into syllable blocks: 한 (han) is ㅎ + ㅏ + ㄴ.
3. South Korea celebrates Hangul Day on 9 October; North Korea marks its alphabet day on 15 January.
4. King Sejong, who created Hangul, appears on South Korea’s 10,000-won banknote.
5. Korean verb endings change with the listener: 고마워 (gomawo) among friends, 감사합니다 (gamsahamnida) to someone you speak to formally.
6. The verb comes at the end of a Korean sentence: 저는 밥을 먹어요 — literally “I rice eat”.
7. Korean has two sets of numbers: native Korean 하나, 둘, 셋 and Sino-Korean 일, 이, 삼. Hours use one, minutes the other.
8. A large part of Korean vocabulary comes from Chinese, much as many English words come from Latin.
9. Korean has English-looking words of its own: a mobile phone is 핸드폰 (haendeupon, “hand phone”).
10. 화이팅 (hwaiting, from “fighting”) is what you shout to cheer someone on.
11. Since June 2023 South Korea officially uses international age; the traditional count, in which a baby is one year old at birth, is still heard in everyday life.
12. In 2021 the Oxford English Dictionary added a series of Korean words, among them hallyu (the Korean wave) and mukbang.
13. 김치 (kimchi) and 태권도 (taekwondo) are Korean words known around the world.
14. Kim, Lee and Park are the most common Korean family names, and the family name comes first.
15. Korean has no articles and no grammatical gender.
16. North and South Korea spell some words differently. The family name Lee is written 이 in the South and 리 in the North.
17. The language of Jeju Island is so different that UNESCO lists it as a critically endangered language of its own.
18. Korean is usually described as a language family of its own; how it relates to other languages is still debated.
19. Hangul has 24 basic letters: 14 consonants and 10 vowels. Its authors wrote that a quick learner could master it before a morning was over.
20. Koreans often avoid “you” and use a title or name instead: 선생님 (seonsaengnim) for a teacher.
21. Small particles after a word show its role: 는 marks the topic, 를 the object.