Languages

Korean

hahn-goo-GUH

Also Known As 한국어 (Hangugeo) / 조선어 (Chosŏnŏ)

Citation Formats

General Reference

Language Atlas. "Korean." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://language.interactiveatlas.org/languages/korean.

APA Style

Language Atlas. (n.d.). Korean. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://language.interactiveatlas.org/languages/korean

BibTeX

@misc{languageatlas-korean,
  author = {Language Atlas},
  title = {Korean},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://language.interactiveatlas.org/languages/korean},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Korean is the primary language of North and South Korea and the sole well-established member of the Koreanic family. It is written with Hangul, the native script promulgated in 1443, whose invention is unusually well documented by comparison with almost every other major script in use today, most of which developed gradually with no single attested inventor or date.

Facts

ISO 639-3 Code

ko 1

Speaker Count

81,000,000 1

Status

Living 1

Region

Official language of North Korea and South Korea; minority language in Jilin, China (Yanbian Prefecture, Changbai County); communities in Sakhalin and Central Asia 2

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

Han Script

This source names Korean directly: "and in the case of Japanese kanji and Korean hanja still partly serves, multiple mutually unintelligible languages, and unifies the many varieties of spoken Chinese in writing even where they cannot..."

Source The Cambridge Encyclopedia of LanguageDavid Crystal (editor)

Japonic

This source names Korean directly: "proposals linking Japonic to Korean, to the Altaic languages, or to Austronesian have each been argued by serious scholars and each rejected or left unproven by the mainstream, so Japonic is treated..."

Source The Cambridge Encyclopedia of LanguageDavid Crystal (editor)