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Korean linguistic data
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Common questions about Korean
What linguistic data does this Korean page show?
Word order, tone, gender count, case marking, adposition direction, syllable structure, consonant inventory traits (three-way stop contrast: plain/aspirated/tense), vowel system, morphological alignment, script, register stratification, speaker count, and geographic area. Each row is one feature with Korean's value visible; you can add other languages to read the same feature side by side.
Where do the Korean data points come from?
Typological features are merged from URIEL+ (Mortensen et al.) and a curated set authored against descriptive grammars. Speaker counts come from Ethnologue and Glottolog. Geographic area is computed from the Asher 2007 world language atlas. Similarity scores combine genetic distance, typological overlap, and lexical-borrowing data.
What are the six Korean speech levels?
From most formal to most casual: hasipsio-che (high formal, news/ceremonies), haeyo-che (polite informal, daily speech to strangers/elders), haeoche-che (rare formal-literary), hae-che (casual, peers), haera-che (plain/blunt, writing or to children), and panmal (intimate, very close friends/family). Wrong choice is socially loud — switching down the wrong way reads rude, switching up reads stiff.
How does the Hangul script work?
Hangul is a featural alphabet — each letter shape encodes the place and manner of articulation of the sound. Letters group into syllable blocks with up to four positions: initial consonant, vowel, optional medial, optional final. ㅎ + ㅏ + ㄴ → 한. The system was designed in 1443 and is one of the youngest mainstream scripts in active use.
Why does Korean cluster typologically with Japanese?
Both share SOV order, agglutinative morphology, postposed particles, no grammatical gender, and six-tiered honorific systems with grammaticalized speech levels. The genetic relationship is contested — most linguists treat Koreanic and Japonic as separate families. The typological component of the similarity score weighs heavily even where genetic and lexical-borrowing components don't. The factor breakdown chip on the row tells you which dimensions contributed most.
Sources for Korean
The grammatical descriptions on this page are informed by the following published reference and descriptive grammars. Grammatical facts themselves are not subject to copyright; the scholars who documented them deserve attribution.
- Yeon, Jaehoon & Brown, Lucien (2019). Korean: A Comprehensive Grammar, 2nd ed. London: Routledge.
- Martin, Samuel E. (2006). A Reference Grammar of Korean. Tokyo: Tuttle.
- Byon, Andrew Sangpil (2017). Modern Korean Grammar: A Practical Guide. London: Routledge.
- Song, Kyung-An (2010). "Various Evidentials in Korean." Proceedings of PACLIC 24, pp. 871–880.