We and our partners use data for Personalised ads and content, ad korean melon content measurement, audience insights and product development. Korean is spoken by about 81.

8 million people mainly in South Korea and North Korea. The relationship between Korean and other languages is not known for sure, though some linguists believe it to be a member of the Altaic family of languages. 2 million Korean speakers in South Korea, and about 25. Status: official language in South Korea, North Korea and Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in northeast China. Origins of writing in Korea Chinese writing has been known in Korea for over 2,000 years. It was used widely during the Chinese occupation of northern Korea from 108 BC to 313 AD.

By the 5th century AD, the Koreans were starting to write in Classical Chinese – the earliest known example of this dates from 414 AD. The Idu system used a combination of hanja together with special symbols to indicate Korean verb endings and other grammatical markers, and was used to in official and private documents for many centuries. The Hyangchal system used hanja to represent all the sounds of Korean and was used mainly to write poetry. The Gukyeol system used hanja characters to represent the sounds of Korean. Chinese characters and also invented about 150 new characters, most of which are rare or used mainly for personal or place names.

Chinese, as did the practice of writing syllables in blocks. Even after the invention of the Korean alphabet, most Koreans who could write continued to write either in Classical Chinese or in Korean using the Gukyeol or Idu systems. The Korean alphabet was associated with people of low status, i. Since 1949 hanja have not been used at all in any North Korean publications, with the exception of a few textbooks and specialized books. In the late 1960s the teaching of hanja was reintroduced in North Korean schools however and school children are expected to learn 2,000 characters by the end of high school. In South Korea school children are expected to learn 1,800 hanja by the end of high school.

The proportion of hanja used in Korean texts varies greatly from writer to writer and there is considerable public debate about the role of hanja in Korean writing. Most modern Korean literature and informal writing is written entirely in hangeul, however academic papers and official documents tend to be written in a mixture of hangeul and hanja. Writing direction: Until the 1980s Korean was usually written from right to left in vertical columns. Since then writing from left to right in horizontal lines has become popular, and today the majority of texts are written horizontally. The letters are combined together into syllable blocks. Other consonsants were created by adding extra lines to the basic shapes. In modern Hangeul the heavenly dot has mutated into a short line.

Spaces are placed between words, which can be made up of one or more syllables. The sounds of some consonants change depending on whether they appear at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of a syllable. A number of Korean scholars have proposed an alternative method of writing Hangeul involving writing each letter in a line like in English, rather than grouping them into syllable blocks, but their efforts have been met with little interest or enthusiasm. In South Korea hanja are used to some extent in some Korean texts.

Malayo-Polynesian language spoken on Buton Island in Indonesia. There is no symbol in IPA to indiciate this. Note on the transliteration of Korean There are a number different ways to write Korean in the Latin alphabet. South Korean transliteration system, which was introduced in July 2000. You can find further details at www. Download Download a Korean alphabet chart in Excel, Word or PDF format.