Korean language

Korean (한국어/조선말, see below) is the official language of both South Korea and North Korea, as well as one of the two official languages in China's Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture. About 80 million people speak Korean worldwide.

Historical linguists classify Korean as a language isolate. The idea that Korean belongs to a putative Altaic language family has been generally discredited. The Korean language is agglutinative in its morphology and SOV in its syntax.

For over a millennium, Korean was written with adapted Chinese characters called hanja, complemented by phonetic systems such as hyangchal, gugyeol, and idu. In the 15th century, Sejong the Great commissioned a national writing system called Hangul, but it did not become a legal script to write Korean until the 20th century when the Japanese government in Korea was established. This happened because of the yangban aristocracy's preference for hanja.

History

Korean is descended from Proto-Korean, Old Korean, Middle Korean, and Modern Korean. Since the Korean War, through 70 year's of seperations North–South differences have developed in standard Korean, including variance in pronunciation, verb inflection, and vocabulary chosen.

Korea University

Coordinates: 37°35′21″N 127°1′56″E / 37.58917°N 127.03222°E / 37.58917; 127.03222

Korea University (KU, Hangul: 고려대학교; hanja: 高麗大學校; RR: Goryeo Daehakgyo) is a university in South Korea. It was established in 1905, making it one of the nation's oldest institutions of higher education. The student body consists of over 20,000 undergraduate students and over 10,000 graduate students. The university’s academic breadth is extensive with its 81 departments in 19 colleges and divisions, and 18 graduate schools and it has over 1,500 full-time faculty members with over 95% of them holding Ph.D. or equivalent qualification in their field. The Korea University Alumni Association consists of more than 280,000 university graduates.

Korea University is a research institution consisting of sixteen undergraduate colleges and twenty graduate divisions. The university is notable in South Korean history for being the first educational institution to offer academic programs in various disciplines, such as law, economics, and journalism. Korea University is particularly well known for its College of Law, which is widely considered to be one of the most prestigious undergraduate law programs in South Korea. Korea University also has auxiliary educational facilities such as the Institute of Foreign Language Studies, the Institute for Continuing Education, the Institute of International Education, and the Center for Teaching and Learning. There are 115 research institutes, including the Battelle@KU Laboratory, the Ilmin International Relations Institute, and the Center for Information Security Technologies.