| Korean is spoken in North and South Korea, although | | | | the differences are more or less equivalent to the |
| there are certain differences between the Korean | | | | Spanish spoken in Spain and the Spanish spoken in |
| dialect spoken in the north and the one spoken in the | | | | Latin America. |
| south. The Korean language is also used in the | | | | The origen of the Korean language is not yet clear. |
| autonomous region of Yanbian which is situated in the | | | | Some linguists say it belongs to the group of the |
| southern province of Heilongjiang in China. | | | | Altaican languages whilst others put it in the same |
| Approximately 78 million people speak Korean, including | | | | group with the Japanese language in one single group: |
| communities of immigrants now living in the former | | | | Korean-Japanese. |
| Soviet Union, Australia, Canada, United States, Brazil, | | | | Since neither of these two views have been |
| Japan, United Kingdom, as well as the Philippines. | | | | demonstrated decisively, those who do study the |
| The so called denomination of the language varies | | | | language prefer to refer to the Korean language as a |
| between both Koreas. In South Korea it is usually | | | | language significantly distinct from the aforementioned |
| called Hangugeo or Hangungmal. Officially the name | | | | groups. From a morphological point of view, the |
| given to Korean is gugeo which means "language of | | | | Korean language uses agglutination which is the |
| the country.Colloquially speaking it is also referred to as | | | | process of adding affixes to the base of a word. |
| urimal that literally means "our language." | | | | Korean maintains a grammatical syntax whose base |
| North Korean typically refer to the Korean language | | | | is Subject-Object-Verb. Japanese, Vietnamese, and |
| as Chos nmal although it is also called urimal. The | | | | the Korean languages are influenced heavily by the |
| standard of North Korea is based on the way it is | | | | Chinese language. |
| spoken in the capital P'yngyang while in the south the | | | | The system utilized for writing Korean is known as |
| standard is the way it is spoken in Seoul. The | | | | Hangeul, and it is at the same time an alphabetical and |
| differences between these two forms of the Korean | | | | phonetic system. It is quite common to use the |
| language does not make it impossible for speakers of | | | | vocabularies that come either directly or indirectly from |
| either group to communicate with each other because | | | | the Chinese language. |