The Korean language is considered an isolate, meaning that it does not have other known relatives. Yet there are theories about its origin, such as Korean being connected to the Altaic languages of central Asia, which are accepted by most Korean linguists and even with some Western linguists as well. There are two standard variations of korean which are the seoul dialect in South Korea and the Pyongyang dialect in North Korea which are distinguished and regulated by each country’s national language policy.
Throughout history, the Korean language has been influenced by external forces, especially by those from its neighbors, China and Japan. The various groups who populated the Korean peninsula merged into a homogeneous people with a single language during the unifications of the 6th to 14th century and by the 15th century is when modern day korean emerged. Korean has also been influenced by the western world, especially after the Korean war.
Chinese has a large influence in the korean language since the chinese characters were used before hangul was created in order to represent the sounds of Korean. Roughly around half of Korean vocabulary has words derived from Chinese. Also during the Japanese colonial rule in Korea has impacted the Korean language. There are a few words that are directly from japanese and some phrases being a direct translation, for example the word about, (-에 있어서) from について). English has also influenced korean language especially with the younger generations and due to the large influence English has in the business and technology world. For example, I recently learned bus (비스) and hot chocolate (핫초코).
These considerations help enhance my understanding of Korean because it provides insights as to how languages can be influenced tremendously due to social, political, and cultural movements. It also helps linguists to be able to track how language has changed by looking at the history and seeing how these events influenced them as seen with Korean.
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