the language of the Koreans, spoken on the Korean Peninsula, in the People’s Republic of China, Japan, the USSR, and the USA by approximately 46 million people (1971 estimate).
Korean is a language isolate, although there exist various hypotheses concerning its origins (Dravidian, Japanese, Paleo-Asiatic [Paleosiberian], Indo-European, and Altaic). Many scholars relate Korean to the Manchu-Tungus language group. Korean has six dialects: the northeastern (including the Korean subdialects of northeastern China), northwestern, central, south-eastern, southwestern, and Cheju-do.
The Korean consonant system is distinguished by three sets of obstruents (weak voiceless, aspirated, strong voiceless), which are neutralized at the end of a syllable, and the “two-faced” phoneme l/r. Consonant clusters at the beginning of a syllable are uncharacteristic, and there are numerous syllable- and word-juncture alternations. The vowel system is distinguished by its wealth of monophthongs and diphthongs (rising diphthongs with nonsyllabic y, w, and the full diphthong ŭi), by phonemic length (with a change in tone height), and by traces of vowel harmony. Stress in some dialects is dynamic, in others it is musical; it occurs in different positions.
Korean is agglutinative with elements of fusion; there is a strong tendency toward analytical development. Morphological word derivation is well developed. Nouns are characterized by a wealth of case forms, the grammatical category of specification, and the absence of grammatical gender. Spatial relationships are distinguished in the demonstrative pronouns. Numerals have two counting systems, Korean and Chinese; counting words (classifiers) are used. Predicatives—verbs and adjectives—do not have person, number, or gender; sentence-conclusive forms and a category indicating social status are found in verbs. Word order is subject-object-predicate; a modifier is always in a preposition. Syntactic relations are expressed by means of postpositions, particles, syntactic nouns, and adverbial-participle, participial, and infinitival forms of predicatives. Complex periods are common. The Korean vocabulary proper is rich in figurative (imitative) words. Foreign loanwords are mainly from Japanese and the European languages; there are many Chinese borrowings.
Until the late 19th century the written literary language was hanmun—a Koreanized version of the Chinese wenyen style. The modern Korean literary language (pyojunmal, “standard language”) is based on the Seoul subdialect of the central dialect; the Pyongyang subdialect is regarded as the standard (munhwao, “cultural language”) in the Korean People’s Democratic Republic.
L. R. KONTSEVICH