Korean language

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Korean is the native language of Koreans as an East-Asian ethnic group. Today, it is the sole official language in both of Republic of Korea (a.k.a. South Korea) and Democratic People's Republic of Korea (a.k.a. North Korea), and also one of the official languages of the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in China. There are presently around 80 million Korean speakers in the world.

Feature

• a agglutinative language
• a language isolate or an Altaic language
• Subject-Object-Verb sentence structure
• 19 consonants and 24 vowels in phonology.
• a syllable consists of onset - nucleus - coda
• about 3000 syllables pronounced

Writing system

Hangeul

한글(Hangeul or Hangul) is the unique writing system of Korean, which was created and promulgated by by King Sejong of Joseon Dynasty, a historic kingdom of Korea. It was completed in late 1443 and published with a book titled HunMinJeongEum in 1446.

It is a featural script and has hybrid feature of alphabet and Syllabary. Each letter of Hangul is alphabetic but it is always used in a syllabic block, not alone. Therefore, 2 or more letters should be grouped as one character to represent elements of the Korean language.

ㄱ, ㄴ, ㄷ, ㄹ, ㅁ, ㅂ, ㅅ, ㅇ, ㅈ, ㅊ, ㅋ, ㅌ, ㅍ, ㅎ, ㅏ, ㅑ, ㅓ, ㅕ, ㅗ, ㅛ, ㅜ, ㅠ, ㅡ, ㅣ 

Hanja

Auxiliary writing system of Korean is Hanja(漢字), which is a logogram derived/borrowed from Chinese character or the Korean name of Chinese character itself. Hanja can not wholly represent Korean language itself but it may be used for some Korean words coined using Chinese characters. Generally, Korean language is exclusively written by Hangul nowadays.

Localization

Locale

• Script direction left-to-right and top-to-bottom in rows
• Date: YYYY/MM/DD, YY/MM/DD

Traditionally, dates are all numeric. if necessary, the day of week is written at the last. In the formula official document of government, it separated by dot and white space(YYYY. MM. DD.) and has not the day of week

• Time: hh:mm:ss
• Time zone: KST (= UTC+09:00)
• Numbers: -9,999.99
• Currency : -￦9,999.99
• Measurements: S.I. metric

National standard

Korean Industrial Standards

Character set and encoding

• KS X 1001:2002 (fomerly KS C 5601-1987)
• KS X 1001:1992 (fomerly KS C 5601-1992)
• KS X 1002:2001 (fomerly KS C 5657-1991)
• KS X 1003:2003 (fomerly KS C 5636)
• KS X 1005-1:2002 (fomerly KS C 5700-1995) - Unicode 2.0

Keyboard layout

• KS X 5002 (fomerly KS C 5715)
• KS X 5003

External links

• Want to know about Hangeul?. The National Academy of the Korean Language, Korea.