Korean belongs to its own language family called the Koreanic family. Yet, it has prominent links to the Altaic languages of central Asia, which include Turkish, Mongolian, and other Siberian languages. The Korean language has vowel harmony, where vowels found near each other in words must be pronounced in a form similar to each other, a trait Korean shares with Mongolian and the Tungusic languages. Due to a history of contact with the Japanese and Chinese languages, it also shares certain linguistic features with these languages. A specific example is the Chinese invasion of Korea in 109 BC, and the power struggle between the two countries until the 19th century. Before Hangul was invented, Korean scripts used a complex system of Chinese characters to represent the sounds of Korean. Also, half the Korean vocabulary consists of words derived from Chinese. Yet because of the ambiguity behind its origins, Korean is defined as a ‘language isolate'. Today, there are also plenty of English loanwords used. This is likely due to a general Korean belief that learning English is a must to succeed in the globalizing world. This helps me understand the language as a melting pot of the linguistic families surrounding it, as well as a unique standout.
It shows in any language the changes that occur due to cross-linguistic interaction, new inventions, and even globalization. One of the most interesting is the changes in the past century, where we observe linguistic changes in gender and ethnic speak corresponding to major social movements. One example is the introduction of neutral pronouns in romantic languages, where most nouns are given a gender. Linguists track these changes by recording and dating the appearance in a language of new words, or of new usages for existing words.
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