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Korean language: the story on HearLore | HearLore
Korean language
In the 15th century, a king personally designed an alphabet to ensure that the common people could read and write, defying the entrenched power of the scholar class. King Sejong the Great of the Joseon Dynasty created Hangul, originally called Hunminjeongeum, to promote literacy among the masses who were previously excluded from written communication. Before this invention, the Korean language was written using complex systems like idu, hyangchal, gugyeol, and gakpil, which were adaptations of Chinese characters that were accessible only to the elite educated in classical Chinese. The majority of the population remained illiterate because these systems were cumbersome and fundamentally mismatched with the structure of the Korean language. Sejong's proclamation of the new script was a radical move to democratize knowledge, yet it faced fierce resistance from the aristocracy who viewed the alphabet as too easy to learn and feared it would undermine their social dominance. Despite this opposition, Hangul quickly spread among the common class and was used to print popular novels, and by the 17th century, even slaves were exchanging letters in the new script, indicating a surprisingly high literacy rate among the lower classes during the Joseon era. The script uses 24 basic letters and 7 complex letters formed from the basic ones, creating a system that is phonetically precise and scientifically designed to represent the sounds of the Korean language.
A Family of One
The linguistic homeland of the Korean language is suggested to be somewhere in contemporary Manchuria, where proto-Koreans expanded into the southern part of the Korean Peninsula around 300 BC. This expansion led to a coexistence with the descendants of the Japonic Mumun cultivators, resulting in a mutual influence that eventually diminished the internal variety of both language families through a founder effect. Korean is a member of the Koreanic language family, which includes the Jeju language, also known as Jejuan, spoken on Jeju Island. Although Jejuan and Korean are not mutually intelligible, they form a compact family with a few extinct relatives. Some linguists have attempted to link Korean to the Altaic family or to Japanese, citing similarities in vocabulary and grammatical features, but the core Altaic proposal has lost most of its prior support. The hypothesis that Korean and Japanese are genetically related has been debated by researchers like Samuel E. Martin and Roy Andrew Miller, with some suggesting that the similarities are due to a sprachbund effect and heavy borrowing rather than a genetic relationship. For instance, the word for hemp, sàm in Middle Korean and asá in Japanese, is well attested in Western Old Japanese and Northern Ryukyuan languages but only occurs in compounds in Eastern Old Japanese, suggesting it may be a borrowed term. Hudson and Robbeets in 2020 suggested that there are traces of a pre-Nivkh substratum in Korean, indicating that ancestral varieties of Nivkh were once distributed on the Korean Peninsula before the arrival of Koreanic speakers.
Who created the Korean alphabet Hangul and when was it created?
King Sejong the Great of the Joseon Dynasty created Hangul in the 15th century. The script was originally called Hunminjeongeum and was designed to ensure that common people could read and write.
Where is the linguistic homeland of the Korean language located?
The linguistic homeland of the Korean language is suggested to be somewhere in contemporary Manchuria. Proto-Koreans expanded into the southern part of the Korean Peninsula around 300 BC.
When did the North Korean government abolish Hanja in writing?
The North Korean government abolished Hanja in writing in 1949. Hanja continues to be taught in schools in North Korea while usage in South Korea is mainly reserved for specific circumstances such as newspapers and scholarly papers.
How long does it take for an English speaker to learn Korean according to the United States Department of Defense?
The United States Department of Defense places Korean in Category IV requiring 64 weeks of instruction to bring an English-speaking student to a limited working level of proficiency. This is in contrast to just 26 weeks for Category I languages like Italian, French, and Spanish.
What are the three models of language and gender proposed for Korean?
Three models of language and gender have been proposed for Korean: the deficit model, the dominance model, and the cultural difference model. The deficit model sees male speech as the default, the dominance model sees women as lacking power, and the cultural difference model attributes speech differences to upbringing.
The hierarchy of the society from which the language originates deeply influences the language, leading to a system of speech levels and honorifics indicative of the formality of any given situation. Korean is an agglutinative language with a subject-object-verb sentence structure, but the verb is the only required and immovable element, making word order highly flexible. The relationship between a speaker and their subject and audience is paramount, reflected in honorifics and speech levels. There are seven verb paradigms or speech levels, each with its own unique set of verb endings that indicate the level of formality of a situation. Unlike honorifics, which show respect towards the referent, speech levels show respect towards the audience. The three levels with high politeness are generally grouped together as jondaenmal, while the two levels with low politeness are banmal. In traditional Korea, the caste and estate systems possessed patterns and usages much more complex and stratified than those used today. Honorifics in contemporary Korea are now used for people who are psychologically distant, and younger-generation speakers no longer feel obligated to lower their usual regard toward the referent. It is common to see younger people talk to their older relatives with banmal, not out of disrespect, but to show the intimacy and closeness of the relationship. The intricate structure of the Korean honorific system flourished in traditional culture and society, and transformations in social structures and attitudes in today's rapidly changing society have brought about change in the way people speak.
The Divide of Two
Since the establishment of two independent governments, North and South Korea have developed differences in standard Korean, including variations in pronunciation and vocabulary chosen. While there tends to be strong political conflict between North and South Korea regarding these linguistic differences, regional dialects within each country actually display greater linguistic variations than those found between North and South Korean standards. Nevertheless, these dialects remain largely mutually intelligible. In North Korea, palatalization of certain consonants is optional, and words that are written the same way may be pronounced differently. For example, the word for 'read' is pronounced differently in the North and South, and the word for 'independent' is also pronounced differently. Some words are spelled differently by the North and the South, but the pronunciations are the same. In general, when transcribing place names, North Korea tends to use the pronunciation in the original language more than South Korea, which often uses the pronunciation in English. The standard languages of North and South Korea, including pronunciation and vocabulary, are both linguistically based on the Seoul dialect, but in North Korea, words have been modified to reflect the theories of scholars like Kim Tu-bong, who sought a refined language, as well as political needs. The North Korean government has abolished Hanja in writing in 1949, but continues to teach them in schools, while their usage in South Korea is mainly reserved for specific circumstances such as newspapers, scholarly papers, and disambiguation.
The Difficulty of Mastery
For native English speakers, Korean is generally considered to be one of the most difficult foreign languages to master despite the relative ease of learning Hangul. The United States Department of Defense places Korean in Category IV, along with Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic, requiring 64 weeks of instruction to bring an English-speaking student to a limited working level of proficiency. This is in contrast to just 26 weeks for Category I languages like Italian, French, and Spanish. The study of the Korean language in the United States was dominated by Korean American heritage language students, who were estimated to form over 80% of all students of the language at non-military universities in 2007. However, Sejong Institutes in the United States have noted a sharp rise in the number of people of other ethnic backgrounds studying Korean between 2009 and 2011, which they attribute to the rising popularity of South Korean music and television shows. In 2018, it was reported that the rise in K-Pop was responsible for the increase in people learning the language in US universities. There are two widely used tests of Korean as a foreign language: the Korean Language Ability Test and the Test of Proficiency in Korean. The TOPIK was first administered in 1997 and was taken by 2,274 people. Since then, the total number of people who have taken the TOPIK has surpassed 1 million, with more than 150,000 candidates taking the test in 2012. TOPIK is administered in 45 regions within South Korea and 72 nations outside of South Korea, with a significant portion being administered in Japan and North America.
The Gendered Voice
In general, Korean lacks grammatical gender, but there are exceptions and gendered differences in speech patterns that reflect the patriarchal society in which the language developed. The third-person singular pronoun has two different forms: geu for male and geunyeo for female, with geunyeo never being used in spoken Korean but appearing only in writing. To have a more complete understanding of the intricacies of gender in Korean, three models of language and gender have been proposed: the deficit model, the dominance model, and the cultural difference model. In the deficit model, male speech is seen as the default, and any form of speech that diverges from that norm is seen as lesser than. The dominance model sees women as lacking in power due to living within a patriarchal society. The cultural difference model proposes that the difference in upbringing between men and women can explain the differences in their speech patterns. Some examples of gendered differences in Korean speech include the softer tone used by women, a married woman introducing herself as someone's mother or wife, not with her own name, and the presence of gender differences in titles and occupational terms. Men learn to use an authoritative falling tone, and in Korean culture, a deeper voice is associated with being more polite. Women who use a rising tone in postposition with -yo are not perceived to be as polite as men. Hedges and euphemisms to soften assertions are common in women's speech, and women traditionally add nasal sounds more frequently than men. Korean society's prevalent attitude towards men being in public and women living in private still exists today, and this is reflected in the language through kinship terms and gendered vocabulary.