Koreanic languages

Koreanic is a compact language family consisting of the Korean and Jeju languages. The latter is often described as a dialect of Korean but is mutually unintelligible with mainland Korean varieties. Alexander Vovin has also suggested that the Yukjin dialect of the far northeast should be similarly distinguished.

Korean has been richly documented since the introduction of the Hangul alphabet in the 15th century. Earlier renditions of Korean using Chinese characters, however, are much more difficult to interpret.

All modern varieties are descended from the Old Korean of the state of Unified Silla, which unified the Three Kingdoms of Korea. What little is known of other languages spoken on the peninsula before the late 7th-century Sillan unification comes largely from placenames. Some of these languages are believed to have been Koreanic, but there is also evidence suggesting that Japonic languages were spoken in central and southern parts of the peninsula. There have been many attempts to link Koreanic with other language families, most often with Tungusic or Japonic, but no proposed genetic relationships has been conclusively demonstrated.^{[page needed]}

The various forms of Korean are conventionally described as "dialects" of a single Korean language, but breaks in intelligibility justify viewing them as a small family of two or three languages.

Korean dialects form a dialect continuum stretching from the southern end of the Korean peninsula to Yanbian prefecture in the Chinese province of Jilin, though dialects at opposite ends of the continuum are not mutually intelligible. This area is usually divided into five or six dialect zones following provincial boundaries, with Yanbian dialects included in the northeastern Hamgyŏng group. Dialects differ in palatalization and the reflexes of Middle Korean accent, vowels, voiced fricatives, word-medial /k/ and word-initial /l/ and /n/.

Korean is extensively and precisely documented from the introduction of the Hangul alphabet in the 15th century (the Late Middle Korean period). Earlier forms, written with Chinese characters using a variety of strategies, are much more obscure. The key sources on Early Middle Korean (10th to 14th centuries) are a Chinese text, the Jilin leishi (1103–1104), and the pharmacological work Hyangyak kugŭppang (鄕藥救急方, mid-13th century). During this period, Korean absorbed a huge number of Chinese loanwords, affecting all aspects of the language. It is estimated that Sino-Korean vocabulary makes up more than half of the Korean lexicon, but only about 10% of basic vocabulary. Old Korean (6th to early 10th centuries) is even more sparsely attested, mostly by inscriptions and 14 hyangga songs composed between the 7th and 9th centuries and recorded in the Samguk yusa (13th century).

The standard languages of North and South Korea are both based primarily on the central prestige dialect of Seoul, despite the North Korean claim that their standard is based on the speech of their capital Pyongyang. The two standards have phonetic and lexical differences. Many loanwords have been purged from the North Korean standard, while South Korea has expanded Sino-Korean vocabulary and adopted loanwords, especially from English. Nonetheless, due to its origin in the Seoul dialect, the North Korean standard language is easily intelligible to all South Koreans.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in response to poor harvests and the Japanese annexation of Korea, people emigrated from the northern parts of the peninsula to eastern Manchuria and the southern part of Primorsky Krai in the Russian Far East. Korean labourers were forcibly moved to Manchuria as part of the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. There are now about 2 million Koreans in China, mostly in the border prefecture of Yanbian, where the language has official status.