The Korean language is spoken by the Korean people, numbering about 70 millions. Of uncertain origin, it is considered by some to belong to Ural-Altaic languages, which include Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish and Japanese.

The official script of Korean has a simple phonetic alphabet called Hangul in Korean meaning Korean language, with 11 vowels and 14 consonants.

It is completely different from and independent of Chinese and Japanese characters. Hangul was developed by a group of scholars under the patronage of King Sejong of Yi dynasty in 1443. This unique phonetic alphabet is well-known for its scientific syllabic system.

Korean can be written horizontally, from left to right, or vertically, in columns starting on the right and moving to left. It is often written with Chinese characters representing some of the Korean syllable combinations, although the current tendency is to avoid Chinese characters in favor of Korean script.

Although Korean has a huge original vocabulary, a large portion of Korean vocabulary is rooted in Chinese, and in 1900s numerous technological terms have come from Japanese, which also in terminological aspect was deeply affected by Chinese.