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  • 2 - Historical Background

  • from Part I - Background
  • Sungdai Cho, State University of New York, Binghamton, John Whitman, Cornell University, New York
  • Book:
    Korean
    Published online:
    14 November 2019
    Print publication:
    12 December 2019, pp 9-29

  • Summary

    Chapter 2 outlines the history of the Korean language, starting from the internal reconstruction of proto-Korean through Old Korean, Middle Korean, Modern Korean and Contemporary Korean. Old Korean designates the language of Silla up until the end of the Unified Silla period in the tenth century. Middle Korean covers the Koryo (Early Middle Korean) and Choson (Late Middle Korean) periods up until the end of the sixteenth century. This relatively brief period has also seen events of great linguistic importance: the Japanese colonial period (1909 to 1945), which saw the importation of Japanese loans and loans from Western languages through Japanese; the Korean War, resulting in the division of the two Koreas; and finally the turbulent postwar period, which has seen the final disappearance of Chinese characters in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the near complete disappearance of them in the Republic of Korea, and the ever greater impact of neologisms and loans from electronic media and the internet.