Korean Culture Introduction to Korean Language and Writing

Korean and Korean language are the same language. Korean (Hangul) is spoken by about 75.6 million people worldwide and is the 13th largest language in the world. As Korea's political and economic status in the international community continues to grow, so does the number of people learning Korean. In countries such as the United States, Japan, and Australia, Korean can be used as a foreign language in university entrance exams.

Internationally, the vast majority of scholars believe that Korean (Korean) belongs to the Altaic language family. The term Altaic language family has been proposed to include Korean (Korean). A very few scholars believe that Korean is an isolated language based on the small number of cognates between Korean and other Altaic languages, but this is not the dominant view in the international academic community. Korean has vowel harmony and is an adhesive language. Korean indicates grammatical relations through complex auxiliaries attached to words and variations in endings. The order of sentence structure in Korean is subject-object-predicate Korean is an epigraphic language, and each word can be spelled out according to its composition without the need for a separate phonetic system. Korean*** has 40 letters, including 21 vowels and 19 consonants. Vowels are further categorized into monophthongs (10) and diphthongs (11). Vowels are the center of Korean syllables, and consonants can only form words when combined with vowels. The vocabulary types of Korean can be categorized into three types: inherent words, Hanja words, and foreign words. Inherent words are the words inherited from the Korean people since ancient times and are the core of the Korean vocabulary.

Most of the words used in the Korean language are inherent words. The majority of Hanja words are of Chinese origin. The pronunciation of Hanja words follows the rules of Korean Hanja, and they can be read by training, and most of their meanings are the same as those of Chinese, but there are also some differences. Hanja words account for more than half of the Korean vocabulary. Foreign words are words borrowed from countries other than China, mostly English.

Before the 15th century A.D., the Korean language was written in Chinese characters. Since Korean and Chinese are completely different languages, it was not easy to use Chinese characters to record the Korean language, coupled with the fact that the general public did not know Chinese characters, it was very unfavorable for cultural exchange and development. In order to solve the problem of writing Korean characters, King Sejong of the Joseon Dynasty organized a group of scholars in 1443 to create hanja, a system of characters suitable for marking the phonetics of the Korean language. These characters were then called "训民正音," meaning "to teach the common people the correct sounds of the words. The invention of hanji contributed to the political, economic, and cultural development of Korea, and King Sejong was loved by future generations.

The Hangul script created by King Sejong was recognized as one of the most practical phonetic scripts in the world, and its scientific nature was highly evaluated by experts in script research. The dialects of the Korean language can be categorized into seven dialects according to their regional distribution: Northwestern, Northeastern, Central, Southwestern, Southeastern, Jeju Island, and Rokjin.