Overall, Korean is seen as a language isolate belonging to the Koreanic language family. However, Chinese has had a major influence on Korean writing and reading during the beginning of the common era. Chinese characters used to be the Korean writing system, called Hanja, for more than a millenium because Korea did not have its own. The majority of the population was not able to read and write during this time period. King Sejong the Great developed the current writing system, Hangul, in the 15th century in order to increase literacy among all social classes. Over time Hanja was slowly phased out. Furthermore, there has also been research about possible common structures of prehistoric Korean and old forms of Japanese, stating that Korean belongs to the Altaic family, but these theories have mostly been declined.
I think it is very interesting that Korea did not have its own writing system for a long time and even once they introduced it, the higher social classes still used the writing system that most people did not understand. This shows a wide power distance in the culture and the importance of social class. In my opinion, it was a very big step for a king to introduce a new writing system serving the entire population. It is also very interesting that Korean is a fairly isolated language with little influences from other countries on the actual language, despite the major influence on the writing system.
Languages change a lot over time, which can also be seen in modern day English. Many “in-words” get added to the language, as well as abbreviations and symbols, like emojis. As languages become more isolated from other languages and people, they develop their own characteristics. In a language family, it is apparent that the languages are connected to one another, but a daughter family can be clearly distinguished from its parent and sister languages. Language trees are utilized by linguists to track the relationships between languages and to identify parent, daughter, and sister languages.
Comments