The Korean language (한국어 or 조선어) is the official language of both North and South Korea. The language is also spoken widely in neighbouring Yanbian, China. Worldwide, there are around 78 million Korean speakers, including large groups in the former Soviet Union, Australia, the United States, Canada, Brazil, Japan, and more recently the Philippines.

The genealogical classification of Korean is debated. It is sometimes placed by several linguists in the Altaic language family, though others considered it to be a language isolate. Korean is agglutinative in its morphology and SOV in its syntax. Like Japanese, the Korean language is also heavily influenced by the Chinese lingual system. Much vocabulary has been imported from Chinese, or created on Chinese models.

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