Korean translations for your company

The Korean language is spoken by about 70 million people in North and South Korea and by another eight million people in China, Japan and the USA. Korean is the official language in North and South Korea as well as in Yanbian, an autonomous prefecture of China. The linguistic classification is not entirely clear; research tends to classify Korean among the Altaic languages. Although grammatically and in terms of intonation it is very close to the Japanese language, a relationship between the two is heavily disputed.

Korean is an agglutinative language in which word relationships are expressed using appended syllables (suffixes). There is no gender, number or article in the grammar, and no inflection of cases, which lends Korean an isolating character. Like Japanese, a distinctive feature of Korean is that it has “sociative causation”, which indicates differences in gender, rank and status, and a variety of words that indicate courtesy and reverence. There are ten vowels and 19 consonants. Syllables are pronounced open and closed. The vocabulary is rich in Chinese borrowings and more recently English loanwords have also been adopted.

There has been a specific Korean script since the 15th century, but Chinese continued to be used as the written language until the 19th century. Today, Korean is written using both the Korean alphabet and Chinese characters; there is an official Latin transcription too.