Here at Transcription City, we offer professional Korean translation services as well as expert Korean transcription services. Want to know more? Let’s start with a little background knowledge on the Korean Language….

Korean is the official language of Korea. In North Korea there are around 22 million speakers and in South Korea there are around 44 million speakers. Korean is also one of the official languages of the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in China. This is located near the border of North Korea. Around 2 million people speak Korean here.

In addition to this, there are millions of Korean speakers across Russia, Japan and the United States. In fact, an estimated 77 million people speak Korean globally.

Korean is part of the Koreanic language family and is considered to be a language isolate (a language that has little or no historical or linguistic relationship with another language). With Korean being spoken across the country, there are several dialects spoken including (Yeongseo dialects, Jeju dialects, Seoul dialects, Jeolla dialects, Gyeongsang dialects and the Phyong’yang dialect in North Korea). Around 60% of Koreans under 40 can speak English.

Since 15th Century, the official writing system of Korean has been Hangul (roughly translated as Great Script’). The Korean alphabet consists of 24 letters (11 vowels and 17 consonants). Modern Korean is written from left to right with spaces between each word but can also be written vertically left to right or right to left.