Where does the Korean language come from? This origin question is of ultimate interest to linguists, but it has also captured the imagination of the Korean lay public, who have tended to conflate the question with broader ones about their own ethnic origin. Linguistic nomenclature has added to the confusion. When specialists speak to the public about “family trees” and “related languages,” the non-specialist naturally thinks that the Korean language has relatives and a biological family like those people do. And when a people as homogeneous as Koreans are told that their language belongs to a family that includes Mongolian and Manchu, they envision their ancestors arriving in the cul-de-sac of the Korean peninsula as horse-riding warriors. It becomes a personal kind of romance.

In this way, linguistic theories presented in a simplistic way tend to overshadow complex ethnographic and archeological issues. But the linguistic question is no less complex, all the more so because, unlike archeological evidence, linguistic evidence cannot be dug from the ground. Artifacts have been extracted from the Korean earth that speak to the structure of earlier societies and cultures, but there is nothing of comparable age to be found in records of the language. To explore the history of the language at that time depth, far beyond what has been actually written down, linguists can only rely upon the comparison of Korean with other languages and hope to find one that has sprung from the same “original” source.