KOREAN TRANSLATION

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ABOUT KOREAN
Korean is the language of the Korean Peninsula in northeast Asia. Worldwide, about 80 million people speak Korean. There are two standard varieties of Korean in Korea: the Phyong'yang dialect in North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea / DPRK) and the Seoul dialect in South Korea (Republic of Korea / ROK). The dialects are distinguished and regulated by each country's national language policy.

The linguistic affiliation of the Korean language is classified as a language isolate because it is not related to any other language. The Korean Peninsula is essentially monolingual, although there is a history of Japanese domination and linguistic imposition. Korean has a long history of contact with the Japanese and Chinese languages. Its grammatical structure is somewhat similar to Japanese, and more than half of its vocabulary has been borrowed from the Chinese. The use of Chinese characters for writing was abolished in North Korea after World War II, but the characters continue to be used in South Korea. Since 1972, the Ministry of Education of South Korea has required public elementary schools to teach students 1,800 basic Chinese characters.

Korean uses a writing system called Hangul. Hangul is generally written horizontally from left to right. The Korean alphabet is the only true alphabet native to the Far East. Korean writing differs from that of most other languages in that the letters of each syllable are grouped together into clusters. Nun is the Korean word for "eye"; mul is the word for "water." Together they form the word nunmul, which means "tear" or "tears."

In the language itself, Korean is known as Kugo. Besides throughout the Korean Peninsula, the language is also spoken in China, Japan, Russia, the U.S. (especially the West Coast and New York), Singapore, Thailand, Guam, and Paraguay.