Understanding Korea materials - Hangeul: 1. Korean Language and Hangeul in East Asia

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 Hangeul: 1. Korean Language and Hangeul in East Asia

1. Korean Language and Hangeul in East Asia

<Figure 1> Korea, China, and Japan (by Google Map)

There are three countries in East Asia: Korea (South Korea and North Korea), China and Japan. Historically, these three neighboring countries have maintained an extremely close relationship, and that intimacy extends to the present, encompassing politics, economics and culture.


However, each one of these three countries possesses distinctive, native language and writing systems. The official spoken languages for Korea, China and Japan are Korean, Mandarin and Japanese, respectively.[1] As described in , these three languages belong to different linguistic families and genuses and use different alphabets.[2] <Figure 2>, <Figure 3-1>, <Figure 3-2>, and <Figure 4> attest to this fact.
[Table 1] Languages and Writing Systems of Korea, China and Japan
Country Language Family/Genus Writing System
Korea Korean language Korean/Korean Hangeul
China Mandarin Sino-Tibetan/Chinese Hanzi
Japan Japanese language Japanese/Japanese Hiragana, Katakana


<Figure 2> Korean Family (by WALS online)
<Figure 3-1> Sino-Tibetan Family (by WALS online)
<Figure 3-2> Mandarin Family (by WALS online)
<Figure 4> Japanese Family (by WALS online)


Comparing language characteristics,[3] Korean is similar to Japanese but considerably different from Chinese. From a morphological point of view, these languages are categorized as follows: Korean and Japanese are agglutinative languages, since most of the words are created by combining morphemes, whereas Chinese is an isolating language, in which each word is composed of a single morpheme.


isolating language  : Chinese
synthetic language polysynthetic language
fusional language
agglutinative language  : Korean, Japanese


Korean and Japanese have a subject-object-verb (SOV) word order while Chinese uses a subject-verb-object (SVO) word order. However, Korean lacks a tone system, while Chinese has a complex tone system, and the Japanese system is simpler than Chinese.


The most prominent differences among Korean, Chinese and Japanese appear in their writing systems. As indicated in <Table 1>, Korea uses Hangeul, China uses Hanzi, and Japan uses Hiragana/Katakana. A writing system can be classified as segmental, logographic or syllabic, according to certain features of each system’s alphabets. In the segmental writing systems, each character represents a phoneme, either a consonant or a vowel. In the logographic writing systems, each character represents either a word or morpheme. In the syllabic writing systems, each character refers to a syllable. According to these criteria, Korea’s Hangeul is a segmental writing system, China’s Hanzi is logographic and Japan’s Hiragana/Katakana is syllabic.[4]
  1. [Table 1] has been arranged mainly based on the official or standard languages that are used in Korea, China and Japan. It is well known that there are minority languages spoken in China and Japan, unlike in Korea. Korea refers to both South and North Korea in [Table 1]. South Korea and North Korea are two different countries politically, yet they use identical language and writing systems, Korean and Hangeul.
  2. More detailed information regarding these languages is available at the website of the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS), http://wals.info/ and Ethnologue: Languages of the World’s website, http://www.ethnologue.com/web.asp.
  3. More detailed linguistic features of Korean, Mandarin and Japanese can be found in WALS, which explains the main characteristics of world languages. WALS introduces 149 features in 10 areas for Korean, 153 features in nine areas for Chinese, and 151 features in 10 areas for Japanese.
  4. Korean consonants have a distinctive feature: as the sound becomes stronger, more strokes are added. This is rooted in the principle of gahoek, or ‘adding strokes’ to basic characters to create new consonants, which originates from the invention of Hunminjeongeum. For example, when one stroke is added to ‘ㄱ[k]’, ‘ㅋ[kh]’ is created, and if one stroke is added to ‘ㄷ[t]’, ‘ㅌ[th]’ is created. Hangeul is classified as a featural writing system when this specific characteristic of its consonants is highlighted. Refer to Appendix 2 of Section 3.2 for more details on featural writing systems and Hangeul. For example, a single syllable [ta] consists of an English consonant [t] and vowel [a] and can be transcribed as follows.
    Hangeul 다[ta]
    Hanzi 它[tā], 她[tā]
    Hiragana/Katakana た/タ[ta]