Korean

A Language with a Script Invented by a King

Korean is the official language of both South Korea and North Korea, spoken by approximately 77 million people across the Korean peninsula and by significant diaspora communities in China, the United States, Japan, and across the world. Korean is a member of the Koreanic language family, a small isolated group with no universally accepted genealogical connection to any other major language family, though linguists have long debated a possible historical relationship with Japanese and the Altaic languages. What makes Korean particularly remarkable in the history of human writing is its script — Hangul — which was deliberately invented in 1443 by King Sejong the Great and a team of royal scholars, making it one of the very few writing systems in the world with a known creator, a known date of invention, and a documented rationale for its design.

Hangul — The World's Most Scientifically Designed Alphabet

Before the invention of Hangul, Korean was written using Chinese characters, a system that was accessible only to the educated elite and poorly suited to representing the sounds of the Korean language. King Sejong commissioned a new script specifically designed to reflect the phonetic properties of Korean speech, with the explicit goal of improving literacy among ordinary people. The result was Hangul, a featural alphabet of extraordinary elegance in which the shapes of the letters are not arbitrary but are modelled on the position of the mouth, tongue, and throat when producing each sound. Hangul consists of 24 basic letters — 14 consonants and 10 vowels — which are grouped into syllable blocks rather than written in a linear sequence like the Latin alphabet. This block structure gives written Korean its distinctive, visually balanced appearance and makes it one of the most logical and learnable writing systems ever devised.

A Grammar That Mirrors Japanese

Korean grammar shares striking structural similarities with Japanese, despite the two languages having no proven common ancestor. Like Japanese, Korean is a subject-object-verb language, meaning the verb always comes at the end of the sentence. Like Japanese, Korean makes extensive use of grammatical particles — small suffixes attached to nouns that indicate their role in the sentence as subject, object, topic, location, or direction. Korean verbs do not change according to person or number, but they carry a great deal of information through suffixes that express tense, aspect, mood, and crucially, the level of politeness appropriate to the social relationship between speaker and listener. This grammatical parallel with Japanese means that speakers of one language often find the other significantly more accessible than speakers of European languages do.

Honorifics and the Language of Respect

Like Japanese, Korean has a deeply embedded system of speech levels and honorifics that reflect the hierarchical nature of traditional Korean society, shaped by centuries of Confucian values. Korean has seven speech levels ranging from the most formal and deferential to the most casual and intimate, and choosing the correct level is essential to communicating appropriately in any social situation. The way you speak to an elder, a stranger, a colleague, a close friend, or a younger person requires not just a different tone but different verb endings, different pronouns, and sometimes entirely different vocabulary. In modern South Korea, two speech levels dominate everyday life — the formal polite level used in professional and public settings, and the informal casual level used among close friends and family. Understanding and navigating these levels is one of the most culturally rich and rewarding aspects of learning Korean.