Korean · 한국어

About Korean

Language family

Koreanic

Where it's spoken

North and South Korea

Speakers

roughly 80 million speakers

Korean is the sole well-established member of the Koreanic family; proposed links to Japanese or to the broader 'Altaic' grouping remain unproven and are not widely accepted among linguists. Its modern alphabet, Hangul, was created under King Sejong in 1443 specifically to give ordinary people an easier way to read and write than the Chinese characters used until then. Centuries of Chinese contact still left a large layer of Sino-Korean vocabulary in the language.