Monday, September 12, 2016

13. Korean

The Korean language is spoken by 77.2 million people, and 48 million speakers live in South Korea and 24 million in North Korea. In continuation, more than 2 million speakers are in China, approximately 1 million are in the United States, and about 500,000 in Japan.

Korean "loanwords" in English are considered to be very rare, with none at all recorded  by the OED before the 19th century. However, the most familiar include,  kimchi (year 1898 ), and taekwondo ( year 1967 ), while other rather rarer words are kono , a traditional Korean board game ( year 1895 ), and kisaeng, the Korean equivalent to a Japanese geisha girl ( year 1895 ).

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