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.
Extant languages
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
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 and word-initial and.Korean is extensively and precisely documented from the introduction of the Hangul alphabet in the 15th century. Earlier forms, written with Chinese characters using a variety of strategies, are much more obscure. The key sources on Early Middle Korean are a Chinese text, the Jilin leishi, and the pharmacological work Hyangyak kugŭppang. 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 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.
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.
The speech of Koreans in the Russian Far East was described by Russian scholars such as Mikhail Putsillo, who compiled a dictionary in 1874. Some 250,000 Koreans lived in the area in the 1930s, when Stalin had them forcibly deported to Soviet Central Asia, particularly Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. There are small Korean communities scattered throughout central Asia maintaining forms of Korean known collectively as Koryo-mar. There is also a Korean population on Sakhalin, descended from people forcibly transferred to the Japanese part of the island before 1945.
Most Koreans in Japan are descendants of immigrants during the Japanese occupation. Most Korean-language schools in Japan follow the North Korean standard. The form of Korean spoken in Japan also shows the influence of Japanese, for example in a reduced vowel system and some grammatical simplification. Korean-speakers are also found throughout the world, for example in North America, where Seoul Korean is the accepted standard.
Jeju
The speech of Jeju Island is not mutually intelligible with standard Korean, suggesting that it should be treated as a separate language. Standard 15th-century texts include a back central unrounded vowel , which has merged with other vowels in mainland dialects but is retained as a distinct vowel in Jeju. The Hunminjeongeum Haerye states that the combination was not found in the standard speech of that time, but did occur in some dialects. It is also distinguished in Jeju. This suggests that Jeju diverged from other dialects some time before the 15th century.Yukchin
The Yukchin dialect, spoken in the northernmost part of Korea and adjacent areas in China, forms a dialect island separate from neighbouring northeastern dialects, and is sometimes considered a separate language. When King Sejong drove the Jurchen from what is now the northernmost part of North Hamgyong Province in 1434, he established six garrisons in the bend of the Tumen River – Kyŏnghŭng, Kyŏngwŏn, Onsŏng, Chongsŏng, Hoeryŏng and Puryŏng – populated by immigrants from southeastern Korea. The speech of their descendants is thus markedly distinct from other Hamgyong dialects, and preserves many archaisms. In particular, Yukchin was unaffected by the palatalization found in most other dialects. About 10 percent of Korean speakers in Central Asia use the Yukchin dialect.Proto-Koreanic
Koreanic is a relatively shallow language family.Modern varieties show limited variation, most of which can be treated as derived from Late Middle Korean.
The few exceptions indicate a date of divergence only a few centuries earlier, following the unification of the peninsula by Silla.
Thus proto-Koreanic is reconstructed largely by applying internal reconstruction to Middle Korean, supplemented with philological analysis of the fragmentary records of Old Korean.
Phonology
A relatively simple inventory of consonants is reconstructed for Proto-Koreanic:| Bilabial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | |
| Stop | * | * | * | * |
| Nasal | * | * | * | |
| Fricative | * | * | ||
| Tap | * | |||
| Approximant | * |
Many of the consonants in later forms of Korean are secondary developments:
- The reinforced consonants of modern Korean arose from consonant clusters *C, *C or *C, becoming phonemically distinct after the Late Middle Korean period.
- The aspirated consonants of Middle and modern Korean similarly arose from clusters *C or *C. There is some disagreement over whether aspirates were already a distinct series in the Old Korean period. However, it seems clear that the process began with * and *, extended to * and finally to *.
- Late Middle Korean had a series of voiced fricatives, , and . These occurred only in limited environments, and are believed to have arisen from lenition of, and, respectively. These fricatives have disappeared in most modern dialects, but some dialects in the southeast and northeast retain, and in these words.
Some, but not all, occurrences of are attributed to lenition of.
Distinctions in the phonographic use of the Chinese characters and suggest that Old Korean probably had two sounds corresponding to later Korean l.
The second of these is often spelled in Middle Korean, and may reflect an earlier cluster with an obstruent.
Late Middle Korean had seven vowels.
Based on loans from Middle Mongolian and transcriptions in the, Ki-Moon Lee argued for a Korean Vowel Shift between the 13th and 15th centuries, a chain shift involving five of these vowels.
William Labov found that this proposed shift followed different principles to all the other chain shifts he surveyed.
The philological evidence for the shift has also been challenged.
An analysis based on Sino-Korean readings leads to a more conservative system:
| Front | Central | Back | |
| Close | * > | * > | * > |
| Mid | * > | * > | * > |
| Open | * > |
The vowels * > and * > have a limited distribution in Late Middle Korean, suggesting that unaccented * and * underwent syncope.
They may also have merged with * in accented initial position or following *.
Some authors have proposed that Late Middle Korean reflects an eighth Proto-Korean vowel, based on its high frequency and an analysis of tongue root harmony.
The Late Middle Korean script assigns to each syllable one of three pitch contours: low, high or rising.
The rising tone may have been longer in duration, and is believed to be secondary, arising from a contraction of a syllable with low pitch with one of high pitch.
Pitch levels after the first high or rising tone were not distinctive, so that Middle Korean had a pitch accent rather than a full tone system.
In the proto-language, accent was probably not distinctive for verbs, but may have been for nouns, though with a preference for accent on the final syllable.