The various forms of Korean are conventionally described as "dialects" of a single Korean language, but breaks in intelligibility justify viewing them as a small family of two or three languages.
Korean Korean dialects form a
dialect continuum stretching from the southern end of the Korean peninsula to
Yanbian prefecture in the Chinese province of
Jilin, though dialects at opposite ends of the continuum are not
mutually intelligible. This area is usually divided into five or six dialect zones following provincial boundaries, with Yanbian dialects included in the northeastern
Hamgyŏng group. Dialects differ in
palatalization and the reflexes of
Middle Korean accent, vowels, voiced fricatives, word-medial and word-initial and . Korean is extensively and precisely documented from the introduction of the
Hangul alphabet in the 15th century (the Late Middle Korean period). Earlier forms, written with Chinese characters using a variety of strategies, are much more obscure. The key sources on Early Middle Korean (10th to 14th centuries) are a Chinese text, the (1103–1104), and the pharmacological work (, mid-13th century). During this period, Korean absorbed a huge number of Chinese loanwords, affecting all aspects of the language. It is estimated that
Sino-Korean vocabulary makes up more than half of the Korean lexicon, but only about 10% of basic vocabulary.
Old Korean (6th to early 10th centuries) is even more sparsely attested, mostly by inscriptions and 14 songs composed between the 7th and 9th centuries and recorded in the (13th century). The
standard languages of North and South Korea are both based primarily on the central
prestige dialect of
Seoul, despite the North Korean claim that their standard is based on the speech of their capital
Pyongyang. The two standards have phonetic and lexical differences. Many loanwords have been purged from the North Korean standard, while South Korea has expanded Sino-Korean vocabulary and adopted loanwords, especially from English. Nonetheless, due to its origin in the Seoul dialect, the North Korean standard language is easily intelligible to all South Koreans. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in response to poor harvests and the
Japanese annexation of Korea, people emigrated from the northern parts of the peninsula to eastern Manchuria and the southern part of
Primorsky Krai in the
Russian Far East. Korean labourers were forcibly moved to Manchuria as part of the
Japanese occupation of Manchuria. There are now about 2 million
Koreans in China, mostly in the border prefecture of
Yanbian, where the language has official status. The speech of Koreans in the Russian Far East was described by Russian scholars such as Mikhail Putsillo, who compiled a dictionary in 1874. Some 250,000 Koreans lived in the area in the 1930s, when Stalin had them
forcibly deported to
Soviet Central Asia, particularly
Uzbekistan and
Kazakhstan. There are small Korean communities scattered throughout central Asia maintaining forms of Korean known collectively as
Koryo-mar. There is also a Korean population on
Sakhalin, descended from people forcibly transferred to the Japanese part of the island before 1945. Most
Koreans in Japan are descendants of immigrants during the Japanese occupation. Most Korean-language schools in Japan follow the North Korean standard. The
form of Korean spoken in Japan also shows the influence of Japanese, for example in a reduced vowel system and some grammatical simplification. Korean-speakers are also found throughout the world, for example in North America, where Seoul Korean is the accepted standard.
Jeju The speech of
Jeju Island is not mutually intelligible with standard Korean, suggesting that it should be treated as a separate language. Standard 15th-century texts include a back central unrounded vowel (written with the Hangul letter ), which has merged with other vowels in mainland dialects but is retained as a distinct vowel in Jeju. The (1446) states that the combination was not found in the standard speech of that time, but did occur in some dialects. It is also distinguished in Jeju. This suggests that Jeju diverged from other dialects some time before the 15th century.
Yukchin The Yukchin dialect, spoken in the northernmost part of Korea and adjacent areas in China, forms a dialect island separate from neighbouring northeastern dialects, and is sometimes considered a separate language. When King
Sejong drove the
Jurchen from what is now the northernmost part of
North Hamgyong Province in 1434, he established six garrisons () in the bend of the
Tumen River –
Kyŏnghŭng,
Kyŏngwŏn,
Onsŏng, Chongsŏng,
Hoeryŏng and
Puryŏng – populated by immigrants from southeastern Korea. The speech of their descendants is thus markedly distinct from other Hamgyong dialects, and preserves many archaisms. In particular, Yukchin was unaffected by the palatalization found in most other dialects. About 10 percent of Korean speakers in Central Asia use the Yukchin dialect. == Proto-Koreanic == Koreanic is a relatively shallow language family. Modern varieties show limited variation, most of which can be treated as derived from
Late Middle Korean (15th century). The few exceptions indicate a date of divergence only a few centuries earlier, following the
unification of the peninsula by
Silla. Thus proto-Koreanic is reconstructed largely by applying
internal reconstruction to Middle Korean, supplemented with philological analysis of the fragmentary records of Old Korean.
Phonology A relatively simple inventory of consonants is reconstructed for Proto-Koreanic: Many of the consonants in later forms of Korean are secondary developments: • The
reinforced consonants of modern Korean arose from consonant clusters *C, *C or *C, becoming phonemically distinct after the Late Middle Korean period. • The
aspirated consonants of Middle and modern Korean similarly arose from clusters *C or *C. There is some disagreement over whether aspirates were already a distinct series in the Old Korean period. However, it seems clear that the process began with * and *, extended to * and finally to *. • Late Middle Korean had a series of voiced fricatives, , and . These occurred only in limited environments, and are believed to have arisen from
lenition of , and , respectively. These fricatives have disappeared in most modern dialects, but some dialects in the southeast and northeast (including Yukchin) retain , and in these words. Middle Korean does not occur initially in native words, a typological characteristic shared with "Altaic" languages. Some, but not all, occurrences of are attributed to lenition of . Distinctions in the phonographic use of the Chinese characters and suggest that Old Korean probably had two sounds corresponding to later Korean
l. The second of these is often spelled in Middle Korean, and may reflect an earlier cluster with an obstruent. Late Middle Korean had seven vowels. Based on loans from
Middle Mongolian and transcriptions in the ,
Ki-Moon Lee argued for a Korean Vowel Shift between the 13th and 15th centuries, a
chain shift involving five of these vowels.
William Labov found that this proposed shift followed different principles to all the other chain shifts he surveyed. The philological evidence for the shift has also been challenged. An analysis based on Sino-Korean readings leads to a more conservative system: The vowels * > and * > have a limited distribution in Late Middle Korean, suggesting that unaccented * and * underwent
syncope. They may also have merged with * in accented initial position or following *. Some authors have proposed that Late Middle Korean reflects an eighth Proto-Korean vowel, based on its high frequency and an analysis of
tongue root harmony. The Late Middle Korean script assigns to each syllable one of three pitch contours: low (unmarked), high (one dot) or rising (two dots). The rising tone may have been longer in duration, and is believed to be secondary, arising from a contraction of a syllable with low pitch with one of high pitch. Pitch levels after the first high or rising tone were not distinctive, so that Middle Korean had a
pitch accent rather than a full
tone system. In the proto-language, accent was probably not distinctive for verbs, but may have been for nouns, though with a preference for accent on the final syllable.
Morphosyntax Korean uses several postnominal particles to indicate
case and other relationships. The modern
nominative case suffix
-i is derived from an earlier
ergative case marker *. In modern Korean, verbs are
bound forms that cannot appear without one or more
inflectional suffixes. In contrast, Old Korean verb stems could be used independently, particularly in verb-verb compounds, where the first verb was typically an uninflected root.
Vocabulary Old Korean pronouns were written with the Chinese characters for the corresponding Chinese pronouns, so their pronunciation must be inferred from Middle Korean forms. The known personal pronouns are * 'I', * 'we' and * 'you'. == Typology and areal features ==