After doing some research on the internet, I was surprised to discover that the language family of Korean seems to be highly contested. Most sources claim that Korean belongs to the Koreanic language family, and consider to be a language isolate. This term is used to describe a language that does not demonstrate any sort of genealogical relationship with other languages, one that does not share a common ancestor with other languages. However, there is some support for the notion that Korean belongs in the hypothesized Altaic family, which mostly has speakers from parts of Asia and some parts of Europe. The Koreanic language family includes Korean languages spoken in both North and South Korea, spanning from the ancient languages spoken from 57 BC to the present-day.
I thought this was really interesting to read about because I had always thought that Korean was a descendant of Chinese languages, but after reading further about its history, I learned that Classical Chinese was not introduced to Korea until a couple of centuries later. It amazes me that Korean has managed to maintain its individuality, even with Chinese and Japanese influences in Korea.
Languages transform through genetic or genealogical classification, which describes the process in which languages develop new traits and characteristics while maintaining its ancestral roots. Language families are formed when proto-languages produce daughter languages, which become parental languages to their own daughter languages. In order to understand the relationships and connections between different languages, these 145+ families are organized into language family trees. However, the extent of our understanding of languages is limited by the availability of recorded history, so it’s possible that there are more language families or the ones we acknowledge now are not accurate.
Comments