Outline of the Korean language

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the Korean language:

Korean – East Asian language spoken by about 80 million people.^[1] It is a member of the Koreanic language family and is the official and national language of North Korea and South Korea, which form Korea. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture and Changbai Korean Autonomous County of Jilin, China. Korean was historically categorized as a language isolate,^[2]^[3]^[4]^[5]^[6]^[7] but this classification is no longer widely accepted because the Jejuan language, which has no mutual intelligibility with any mainland Korean variety, is increasingly recognized as a separate language in its own right rather than just a divergent Korean dialect. Korean, Jejuan, and a few extinct relatives form the Koreanic language family. Korean is agglutinative in its morphology and follows an subject-object-verb word order in its syntax.

History