朝鲜语通行于南、北朝鲜，约有五千万人讲这种语言。此外，在中国还有一百多万人，在
日本有五十万人，在苏联有三十五万人。

朝鲜语归于哪个语族，现在还不能确定，虽然它的语法结构和日语最相似。尽管朝鲜语中
有许多汉语借词，并且几百年来，朝鲜语一直是汉字和朝鲜文字搀杂使用，但是它和汉语
肯定没有亲源关系。北朝鲜在二次大战后已经不再使用汉字了，南朝鲜正在逐步用朝鲜文
字来完全取代汉字。

1443年—1446年发明的朝鲜字母，是唯一真正的具有远东特点的字母。二十五个字母中，
每一个字母代表一个辅音或元音，这和代表音节的日语字母不同，也和代表概念的汉字不
同。然而，朝鲜语文字和其它多数语言的文字的不同之处在于：每个音节的字母都结合成
一组。如nun在朝鲜语的意思是眼睛，而mul的意思是水，合起来构成nunmul，是“眼泪”
、“许多眼泪”的意思。
大不列颠百科全书的定义：

Korean language　

language spoken by more than 72 million people (mostly in North Korea and Sout
h Korea) and the official language of both North Korea and South Korea, with m
inor variations in orthographic standards.

Most of what is known about the Korean language dates from the creation in 144
3 of the script (now commonly called Hangul) to write Middle Korean. Informati
on on earlier vocabulary is found in vocabularies compiled by the Chinese and　
in poorly deciphered poems of the Silla kingdom called hyangga, which were com
posed as early as the 10th century. There is no agreement on the relationship　
of Korean to other languages. The most likely relatives are Japanese and the A
ltaic languagesTurkic, Mongolian, and especially Manchu-Tungus.

The Hangul alphabet consists of simple symbols for the consonants and vowels.　
These are grouped into syllable blocks, with minor graphic modifications in ce
rtain configurations. (See the Table.) The most popular English-language trans
cription is the McCune-Reischauer system, but for many purposes linguists pref
er the Yale romanization because it closely follows Hangul spellings, which ar
e etymological or morphophonemic and distinguish basic forms that merge in a p
honetic transcription.

Korean has borrowed many words from Classical Chinese, including most of its t
echnical terms and about 10 percent of its basic nouns, such as san ''mountain''
and kang ''river.'' The borrowed words are sometimes written in Chinese charact
ers.

Korean sentences are very similar to those of Japanese, though the words sound
quite different. Modifiers always precede what they modify. The unmarked orde
r is subject + indirect object + direct object + predicate. Only the predicate
is essential, and other information may be omitted. Actions are expressed by　
processive predicates (verbs), and characteristics are expressed by descriptiv
e predicates (adjectives). There are several different styles of speech and wa
ys to end a sentence with reference to the social situation, the speaker''s att
itude, and the relationship of the sentence to wider context. The most common　
style ends a sentence with the infinitive -o or -a, often followed by -yo to s
how friendly politeness. Depending on the speaker''s intonation, a sentence may
express a statement, a question, a command, or a proposition. Each of these f
our types of sentence uses a distinctive ending in both the formal style (whic
h shows deference to the hearer) and the plain style. In the formal style, -(su)mnida marks a statement and -(su)mnikka a question. Frequentl
y the predicate marks the subject as someone special ("you" or "the teacher")　
by inserting the honorific marker -(u)si-. The predicate also can be marked to
indicate tense and aspect, and devices exist to adnominalize a sentence to mo
dify a noun or adverbialize it as a subordinate clause. Nouns attach particles
to show their role in the sentence, but the case markers for subject and obje
ct are often omitted or are masked by particles of focus used to highlight a w
ord or place a topic in the background.


加州大学落衫基分校世界语言数据库的定义：

Korean Profile

Alternate NameKugo

Number of SpeakersApproximately 72 million

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Korean, known in the language itself as Kugo, is the language of the Korean Pe
ninsula in northeast Asia. In the Democratic People''s Republic of Korea (DPRK,
or North Korea) there are 20 million speakers and in the Republic of Korea (R
OK, or South Korea) there are 42 million speakers. Korean is also spoken by al
most 2 million people in China, mainly in provinces bordering North Korea. The
re are approximately half a million speakers in Japan and Russia, as well as s
ignificant numbers in the United States (over 600,000) with large communities　
on the west coast and in New York. Other communities are found in Singapore, T
hailand, Guam, and Paraguay. The total number of speakers is 72 million (Grime
s 1992).　

There are no sizable language minorities in either North or South Korea. The K
orean Peninsula is, and traditionally has been, an essentially monolingual reg
ion, although there is a history of Japanese domination and linguistic imposit
ion.

LINGUISTIC AFFILIATION

Although classified as a language isolate, many theories have been proposed to
explain the origin of Korean. The most prominent of these link Korean to the　
Altaic languages of central Asia, a family that includes Turkish, Mongolian, a
nd the Tungusic (for example, Manchu) languages of Siberia. Others would argue
for the inclusion of Uralic languages (Hungarian and Finnish) and Japanese in
this macro family. Although not definitively proven, this affiliation is acce
pted by most Korean linguists and deemed likely by Western linguists as well.　
The competing theory associates Korean with the Dravidian languages of souther
n India, or to Austronesian languages.

Determining Korean''s linguistic affiliation is complicated by a long history o
f contact with the Japanese and Chinese languages. Not surprisingly, Korean sh
ares certain linguistic features with each of these languages.　

LANGUAGE VARIATION

Officially, there are two standard varieties of Korean in Koreathe Seoul dia
lect in South Korea and the Phyong''yang dialect in North Korea. The dialects a
re distinguished and regulated by each country''s national language policy.

Regional dialects roughly correspond to province boundaries. Thus, South Korea
n regional dialects are Kyonsang, Chungchong, Cholla, and Cheju Island. The No
rth Korean regional dialects are Hamkyong, Pyongan, Hwanghae. Some of the dial
ects are not easily mutually intelligible.　

ORTHOGRAPHY

Korean uses a writing system called Hangul that has twenty four basic symbols　
representing the sounds of Korean (see Kim 1992). Words of Chinese origin have
traditionally been written with Chinese characters, called Hanja, instead of　
being spelled out in Hangul. This practice is discouraged in North Korea, but　
is quite common in South Korean writing.

The symbols of Hangul are units reflecting Korean syllable structure. These sy
llables are sometimes referred to by Koreans as the actual "letters" of Hangul
. Instructional material often presents Hangul in syllabary tables that graph　
the possible consonant and vowel combinations of the Korean language rather th
an citing the phonemic symbols individually. Hangul is generally written horiz
ontally from left to right, although it has been written in earlier times like
Chinese, vertically, from right to left.

South Korea has an official Roman orthography (referred to as the McCune Reisc
hauer system); it is mainly used on signs and maps (Grimes 1992). Other Romani
zation systems are also in use today.

LINGUISTIC SKETCH

Korean is a morphologically rich language in which many grammatical functions　
are marked by inflection and affixes; but similar to Altaic languages, gender　
and number are not marked, and the language lacks articles, fusional morpholog
y, relative pronouns, conjunctions and agglutination. Nouns are not inflected　
as such; rather, there is a class of postpositional particles or suffixes whic
h may be used to mark 7 cases (nominative, genitive, accusative, dative, locat
ive, instrumental, and comitative). Grammatical gender and number are not mark
ed.

Verbs are formed by suffixing morphemes denoting tense, aspect, modality, form
ality, and social status of interlocutors, with a potential of hundreds of for
ms. Person and number of the subject or object are not marked on the verb. Pro
nouns and verb forms are marked to reflect the social status of the interlocut
ors, Broadly speaking, there are four levelsplain, informal polite, formal p
olite, and honorific.

Korean is a Subject-Object-Verb language, but as long as the verb occurs in se
ntence-final position the order of other constituents can vary.　

Korean has eight vowel phonemes and 22 consonants. Salient among the consonant
inventory are contrasts between unaspirated, aspirated, and glottalized voice
less stops. The morphophonemics of Korean are complex, involving vowel harmony
, glide formation, vowel contraction and deletion, and several types of conson
ant assimilation.　

Along with a large body of Chinese loan words, more than half of Korean vocabu
lary, there is also a small percentage of Western loan words in Korean, borrow
ed mostly from English. Japanese borrowings are also found, but are largely li
mited to colloquial speech.

ROLE IN SOCIETY

After the division of the country in 1945, each nation developed its own langu
age policy. In North Korea, Hangul was adopted as the sole system for writing　
Korean; Chinese characters are never used and are replaced with their phonetic
equivalent in Hangul. In South Korea, the abolition of Chinese characters fro
m written Korean has been attempted with government support more than once but
never maintained beyond a few years. Since 1972, the Ministry of Education of
South Korea has required public schools to teach students 1,800 "basic charac
ters", and then incrementally add characters in middle and high schools for a　
total of 3,600. Both countries have introduced campaigns to discontinue use of
any words of foreign origin in everyday speech, especially words of Chinese o
rigin. They encourage the use of words of Korean origin, even if it means tran
slating them with new words composed of native roots. The North Korean governm
ent uses newspapers and magazines to propagate the use of the new lexical terms. In South Korea, government This policy has been actively pur
sued by the North Korean government, using newspapers and magazines to propaga
te the use of the new lexical items. In South Korea, purification is most inte
nse among scholars who advocate a revised vocabulary through the media and aca
demic journals. The South Korean government, however, has never officially sup
ported this policy. Literacy rates are high in both countries (over 90 percent
in the late 1980s [Grimes 1992]).

HISTORY

The earliest forms of Korean can be divided into two dialects. In northern par
ts of the Korean Peninsula and Manchuria, Puyo was spoken. Han, the progenitor
of Modern Korean, was spoken in small kingdoms in the southern part of the pe
ninsula. In the seventh century, the Silla kingdom, a Han-speaking group, unif
ied the peninsula, leading to the spread of Han throughout the Korean Peninsul
a.　

In the fifteenth century, King Sejong of the Yi Dynasty commissioned the devel
opment of a phonetically based script for Korean. Until that time, Korean had　
been written with Chinese characters, and literacy was restricted to a small,　
educated elite. Scholars and the elite opposed the new script, however, and Ha
ngul did not manage to displace the Chinese script among the educated elite un
til the nationalistic democratization movement at the end of the nineteenth ce
ntury. This movement led to the printing of the first Hangul newspaper in 1894
. Soon after, books and government documents were also published in Hangul.　


The modern effort to establish Hangul as the writing system of the Korean lang
uage was ended in 1910 by Japan, which formally annexed the peninsula as a col
ony of its empire. During the colonial occupation, Japanese was the official l
anguage of Korea; Korean was suppressed by laws forbidding its use. Japanese b
ecame the language of instruction in the schools and by 1938 the Korean langua
ge had been completely eradicated from the curriculum. In 1940, Koreans were f
orced to change their family names and use Japanese surnames instead.

In 1945, the Japanese occupation ended and, in spite of national division and　
civil war, this enabled the re establishment of Korean as the dominant languag
e of the Korean Peninsula and Hangul as its dominant written medium.