Distribution

KOREA, China, Japan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan; significant emigrant or student groups in the UK, the USA (including Hawaii), Canada, Australia, New Zealand.

Introduction

The Korean language is regarded by some scholars as belonging, like Turkish, to the Ural-Altaic language family. There are also some similarities between Korean and Japanese in that the syntax is similar, and both Korean and Japanese still use some Chinese characters, although the pronunciation is not as it is in China. However, it is important to emphasise that the Korean language, along with many Korean customs and ways of experiencing the world, is unique and unrelated to any other oriental languages.

Korean is now spoken by nearly 72 million people, 69 million living on the Korean peninsula and islands and the remaining three million abroad. It is the official language of both North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) and South Korea (Republic of Korea) but the separation of the two countries has resulted in minor differences in spelling and vocabulary choice. In South Korea there are seven dialects, including that spoken around the capital, Seoul, which is referred to as Standard Korean. There are differences of pronunciation from one dialect to another which can make them mutually incomprehensible. This also means that speakers of one dialect may have greater difficulties adapting to English than speakers of another, in that some dialects have sounds that more closely approximate to those of English than others.