Girls' Generation

Girls' Generation (Hangul: 소녀시대; So Nyeo Si Dae), also known as SNSD, is a South Korean girl group formed by S.M. Entertainment. The group is composed of eight (formerly nine) members: Taeyeon, Sunny, Tiffany, Hyoyeon, Yuri, Sooyoung, Yoona, and Seohyun. Girls' Generation officially debuted on August 5, 2007 with its debut single "Into the New World" and subsequently gained some attention with their self-titled debut album. However, it was not until 2009 that they rose to prominence with the single "Gee", which claimed the top spot on KBS's Music Bank for a record-breaking nine consecutive weeks and was named the most popular song of the 2000s decade by Melon. The group solidified their place in the South Korean music industry with follow-up singles "Tell Me Your Wish (Genie)", "Oh!", and "Run Devil Run" from late 2009 to early 2010.

In mid-2010, the group signed with Nayutawave Records (present-day EMI Records Japan) to embark into the Japanese music scene. In April 2011, Girls' Generation's Japanese self-titled debut album was released, which peaked atop the Japanese Oricon Albums Chart and became the first album by a South Korean girl group to achieve a double Platinum certification by the RIAJ. The group returned to the South Korean music scene in October 2011 with The Boys, which has sold over 457,000 copies in South Korea, becoming the best-selling album in the Gaon chart history since its launch in 2010. During this time, the group also expanded their endeavor to the United States by signing with Interscope Records. In 2013, Girls' Generation's fourth Korean studio album titled I Got a Boy was released. The title track was subjected to major attention from western media after it was awarded Video of the Year at the inaugural YouTube Music Awards.

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.