Along with other languages such as Chinese and Arabic, Korean is ranked at the top difficulty level for English speakers by the United States Department of Defense.

[7][8] Whitman (2012) suggests that the proto-Koreans, already present in northern Korea, expanded into the southern part of the Korean Peninsula at around 300 BC and coexisted with the descendants of the Japonic Mumun cultivators (or assimilated them).

[9] Since the establishment of two independent governments, North–South differences have developed in standard Korean, including variations in pronunciation and vocabulary chosen.

In the 15th century King Sejong the Great personally developed an alphabetic featural writing system, known today as Hangul, to promote literacy among the common people.

[13][14][15] Introduced in the document Hunminjeongeum, it was called eonmun ('colloquial script') and quickly spread nationwide to increase literacy in Korea.

[20] In the context of growing Korean nationalism in the 19th century, the Gabo Reform of 1894 abolished the Confucian examinations and decreed that government documents would be issued in Hangul instead of literary Chinese.

Some older English sources also use the spelling "Corea" to refer to the nation, and its inflected form for the language, culture and people, "Korea" becoming more popular in the late 1800s.

The "han" (韓) in Hanguk and Daehan Jeguk is derived from Samhan, in reference to the Three Kingdoms of Korea (not the ancient confederacies in the southern Korean Peninsula),[25][26] while "-eo" and "-mal" mean "language" and "speech", respectively.

[28] The hypothesis that Korean could be related to Japanese has had some supporters due to some overlap in vocabulary and similar grammatical features that have been elaborated upon by such researchers as Samuel E. Martin[29] and Roy Andrew Miller.

[35] Korean syllable structure is (C)(G)V(C), consisting of an optional onset consonant, glide /j, w, ɰ/ and final coda /p, t, k, m, n, ŋ, l/ surrounding a core vowel.

The traditional prohibition of word-initial /ɾ/ became a morphological rule called "initial law" (두음법칙) in the pronunciation standards of South Korea, which pertains to Sino-Korean vocabulary.

Generally, someone is superior in status if they are an older relative, a stranger of roughly equal or greater age, or an employer, teacher, customer, or the like.

Some examples of this can be seen in: (1) the softer tone used by women in speech; (2) a married woman introducing herself as someone's mother or wife, not with her own name; (3) the presence of gender differences in titles and occupational terms (for example, a sajang is a company president, and yŏsajang is a female company president); (4) females sometimes using more tag questions and rising tones in statements, also seen in speech from children.

Korean society's prevalent attitude towards men being in public (outside the home) and women living in private still exists today.

Also in kinship terminology, oe (외 'outside' or 'wrong') is added for maternal grandparents, creating oeharabeoji and oehalmeoni (외할아버지, 외할머니 'grandfather and grandmother'), with different lexicons for males and females and patriarchal society revealed.

However, since the 1950s, large numbers of people have moved to Seoul from Chungcheong and Jeolla, and they began to influence the way men speak.

[36][page needed] Women use more linguistic markers such as exclamation eomeo (어머 'oh') and eojjeom (어쩜 'what a surprise') than men do in cooperative communication.

[45] Many words have also been borrowed from Western languages such as German via Japanese (e.g. 아르바이트 (areubaiteu) 'part-time job', 알레르기 (allereugi) 'allergy', 기브스 (gibseu or gibuseu) 'plaster cast used for broken bones').

Some dialects are conservative, maintaining Middle Korean sounds (such as z, β, ə), which have been lost from the standard language, and others are highly innovative.

For example, "garlic chives" translated into Gyeongsang dialect is /t͡ɕʌŋ.ɡu.d͡ʑi/ (정구지; jeongguji), but in Standard Korean, it is /puːt͡ɕʰu/ (부추; buchu).

* In the North, similar pronunciation is used whenever the Hanja "的" is attached to a Sino-Korean word ending in ㄴ, ㅁ or ㅇ.

For example: Some grammatical constructions are also different: In the North, guillemets (《 and 》) are the symbols used for quotes; in the South, quotation marks equivalent to the English ones (" and ") are standard (although 『 』 and 「 」 are also used).

[69] Korean-speaking minorities exist in these states, but because of cultural assimilation into host countries, not all ethnic Koreans may speak it with native fluency.

In North Korea, the regulatory body is the Language Institute of the Academy of Social Sciences (사회과학원 어학연구소; 社會科學院語學硏究所; Sahoegwahagwŏn ŏhagyŏn'guso).

Unlike that organization, however, the TOPIK Korea Institute operates within established universities and colleges around the world, providing educational materials.

[72] For native English-speakers, Korean is generally considered to be one of the most difficult foreign languages to master despite the relative ease of learning Hangul.

For instance, the United States' Defense Language Institute places Korean in Category IV with Japanese, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), and Arabic, requiring 64 weeks of instruction (as compared to just 26 weeks for Category I languages like Italian, French, and Spanish) to bring an English-speaking student to a limited working level of proficiency in which they have "sufficient capability to meet routine social demands and limited job requirements" and "can deal with concrete topics in past, present, and future tense.

"[73][74] Similarly, the Foreign Service Institute's School of Language Studies places Korean in Category IV, the highest level of difficulty.

인간은 천부적으로 이성과 양심을 부여받았으며 서로 형제애의 정신으로 행동하여야 한다.Modeun inganeun taeeonal ttaebuteo jayuroumyeo geu joneomgwa gwollie isseo dongdeunghada.

Inganeun cheonbujeogeuro iseonggwa yangsimeul buyeobadasseumyeo seoro hyeongjeaeui jeongsineuro haengdonghayeoya handa.All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.