Korean is the official language of North and South Korea. It is also one of the world's oldest living languages with roughly about 80 million Korean speakers. The language was formerly written by borrowing some Chinese characters called Hanja, which were articulated in the Korean way.
There is a constant controversy over the genealogical distinction of the Korean language as some linguists believe that Korean belongs to the Altaic family of languages that came into existence in northern Asia and includes the Turkic, Mongol, Hungarian, Finnish and Tungusic (Manchu) languages.
With the Korean War giving rise to North and South differences, the language has developed discrepancy in its pronunciation, verb as well as vocabulary. In South Korea, the language is generally called Hangungmal, whereas in North Korea it is most often called Chosŏnmal.
A flashback in the period from 1910-1945 will take us to the entire Korean peninsula that was under the Japanese rule. Many Japanese language vocabulary and compounds were brought into Korea during this period. Despite the several futile attempts to prohibit the use of the Korean language, the audacious work displayed by the members of the Korean Language Society, resulted in the success and survival of the Korean language.
As a result, the Korean language had some major overlap in vocabulary and grammatical structures which led to the belief that Korean might be related to Japanese in some way. However, other linguists argue that the similarities are not due to any genetic relationship, but rather due to heavy borrowing, especially from Korean into Western Old Japanese.
Then there is another belief that Korean has heavily borrowed thousands of Chinese words from the Chinese, although they belong to different language families! However, the mixture of Chinese ideograms (Hanja) and a native Korean alphabet (Hangul) may have been used to write the Korean language.
Additionally, the invention of the Korean alphabet took place in 1444 and was propagated in 1446. The alphabet was formerly called Hunmin jeongeum, but has also been known as Eonmeun (meaning vulgar script) and Gukmeun (which means national writing). Thereafter, the alphabet got a contemporary name - Hangeul, which was coined by a Korean linguist named Ju Si-gyeong (1876-1914).
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