• The Korean language belongs to the Ural-Altaic family of languages, which also includes Turkish and Mongolian. Linguistically, Korean is very similar to Japanese. Despite Korean and Chinese not being related in terms of grammatical structure, more than 50 percent of all Korean vocabulary is derived from Chinese “loanwords”.
• There are 78 million Korean speakers world-wide.
• The Korean alphabet is called Hangul. It was created in 1443 by Sejong, the fourth king of the Yi Dynasty. The basic Korean alphabet consists of 10 vowels and 14 consonants.
• Despite its compact alphabet, the Korean language is difficult to transliterate. Hangul was designed to put an image of sound on paper, placing no emphasis on spelling, and making it very difficult to produce standardised dictionaries. The first standardised publication of Korean dictionaries did not occur until 1972.

Roevin provides high quality translations into the Korean language as well as other Far Eastern languages. For a free quotation please contact us.