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| Street signs in
Korean and English; Daegu, South Korea. |
Korean
The Korean language (Korean), is spoken mainly in North
and South Korea. It is spoken by more than 78 million
people (most of whom are North or South Koreans).
In South Korea, it is called han'gukmal or han'gugeo. In
North Korea, however, it is called chosŏnmal or chosŏnŏ.
They are named differently because the common names for
North and South Korea are different. In additional,
Koreans usually call their language, "our language" or
"our country's language". |
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Writing
The Korean language uses two different writing systems.
The first is Hangul, the main alphabet. In North Korea,
only Hangeul (Known as Chosǒngǔl in North Korea) is used
by law. In South Korea, only Hangeul should be used in
most public areas like education, but the second system,
Hanja, is still used in some newspapers and professional
areas.
Hanja is the system of Chinese characters that are used
in Korean. Hanja was the only way to write Korean before
the creation of Hangeul in the 15th century, and it was
common in novels before the 19th century. |
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Despite the fact that King Sejong the Great led the
development of Hangeul in order to allow literacy to
spread among common people and to create a writing
system that more accurately represented the Korean
language than Hanja, it was not adopted by the upper
classes of Koreans, and therefore Hanja would continue
to be the official writing system util the late 19th
century.
Despite it being rejected by the elite classes, Hangeul
was used often by lower classes as a way to write down
Korean literature and for lower classes to communicate
with each other. |
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