Korean is hard to establish for its long history of contact with Chinese and Japanese. According to the Southern theory, Korean belongs to the Austronesian language family. However, according to the Northern theory, Korean is a member of the Altaic language family.
Beginning in the 5th century, the Korean language was originally written in hanja, borrowed Chinese characters. The decision to develop an unique alphabet that could be used by all the Korean peoples was revolutionary at that time. Before this, only Korea’s upper class utilized hanja because they were educated to read and write in Chinese.
Korean people adopted ‘hanzi’ from China to write ‘hanja’ referring to Korean words of Chinese origin. The use of Chinese characters brought a large number of loanwords into the Korean language with the result that more than half of Korean vocabulary is made up of borrowings from Chinese. The characters used in Korean (hanja) look similar to traditional Chinese characters than simplified Chinese characters and they typically have similar meanings. For example, ‘書’ is hanja in Korean which means writing and reading, and in Chinese, it is the traditional characters which mean book.
However, the family tree of Korean is still controversial, which need linguists to research more.
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