The Korean Language

The Kore­an lan­guage, spo­ken by an esti­mat­ed 73 mil­lion peo­ple on the Kore­an Penin­su­la, is a com­plex mix­ture of Chi­nese lex­i­cal influ­ences and a unique native word and sen­tence struc­ture. While Kore­an gram­mar shares many sim­i­lar­i­ties with Japan­ese, Turk­ish and oth­er agglu­ti­na­tive lan­guages, no defin­i­tive genet­ic link has been estab­lished between Kore­an and oth­er lan­guages in the world, and the lan­guage’s ori­gin remains a heat­ed top­ic of aca­d­e­m­ic debate. Kore­an boasts the most sci­en­tif­ic script in the world, Hangeul, which was designed by a team of roy­al lin­guists by order of the Kore­an king in the 1440s.

Fol­low­ing a peri­od of unprece­dent­ed eco­nom­ic growth, South Korea today has emerged as one of Asi­a’s pow­er­house economies. Kore­a’s advanced mod­ern busi­ness land­scape boasts some of the most wide­ly rec­og­nized brands in the world, and the coun­try remains at the fore­front of inter­na­tion­al devel­op­ments in sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy. Korea also boasts a rich pop­u­lar cul­ture that has become an export com­mod­i­ty of its own right in the form of food, pop­u­lar music, and film.