There have been many debates among linguists with regard to the classification of the Korean language. Most of them have managed to reach a consensus and place Korean in the Ural-Altaic family of languages. Others consider it an isolate language due to the lack of evidence of its belonging to a particular group.

In spite of the similarities it shares with Japanese, linguists have failed to find a historical relationship between the two languages.

The Korean alphabet consists of a mixture of native alphabet (Hangul) and Chinese ideograms (Hanja). The Chinese alphabet was used during 108 BC and 313 AD when Korea was under Chinese occupation. The Korean alphabet was promulgated during the reign of King Sejong (1418-1450) and at the end of the nineteenth century it got the name of “Hangul”. It is still used nowadays and it contains 14 consonants and 10 vowels which are combined to create syllable bodies.

Korean has several dialects, most of them grouped around the two main dialects spoken in Seoul (South Korea) and Pyongyang (North Korea). These dialects are generally mutually intelligible, the main difference between them being the use of stress.

The North Korean leaders have tried to eliminate all foreign influences they detected in the language and thus contributed to a further differentiation between the language spoken in Pyongyang and the one used in Seoul.

The Korean vocabulary is made up of Korean words mostly (60%, a high percentage of them derived from Chinese). The rest are borrowed directly from Chinese, Mongolian, Japanese and, more recently, from German and English.

Korean is spoken by over 75 people living in the Korean Peninsula as well as in China (over 2 million speakers), the US (also 2 million), Japan (approximately 700 thousand people) and Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan (around 500 thousand people).

It ranks fifteenth in the top of the most widely spoken languages.