Korean grammar

This article is a description of the morphology and semantics of Korean. For phonetics and phonology, see Korean phonology. See also Korean honorifics, which play a large role in the grammar.

Morphology

Korean is primarily an agglutinative language, as can be seen especially in the section on verbs below.

Pronouns

Korean has personal pronouns for the 1st and 2nd person, with distinctions for honorifics. In the third person, it has demonstrative pronouns, which distinguish three distances.

* The topic marker occurs by itself to mark the topic of a sentence, but after other case markers to mark contrast.

** The genitive case clitic 의 is usually pronounced "e."

Numerals and classifiers

Finite verbs

Verbs are the most complex part of speech in Korean. Their structure when used as the predicate of a clause is prefix + root + up to seven suffixes, and can be illustrated with a template:

Active verbs use the attributive suffix 은 "-eun" after a consonant, or ㄴ "-n" after a vowel, for the past tense. For descriptive or stative verbs, often equivalent to adjectives in English, this form is used for generic (gnomic) descriptions; effectively, "eaten food" is food which once was eaten (past), whereas "a pretty flower" is a flower which has become pretty, and still is (present/timeless). To specify the on-going action for an active verb, the invariable suffix 는 "-neun" is used instead. This is not found on descriptive verbs, as it makes no sense to say that *"a flower is being pretty". For the future, the suffix 을 "-eul," ㄹ "-l" is used, and in the imperfective/retrospective (recalling what once was) it is "-deon."

For example, from the verb 먹 "meog" "to eat", the adjective 예쁘 "yeppeu" "pretty", and the nouns 밥 "bap" "food" and 꽃 "kkot" "flower", we get:

The perfective suffix 었 "-eoss" is sometimes used as well, on active verbs. It precedes the attributive suffix:

*먹었던 밥 "meogeotteon bap" "food which had been eaten" [what's the diff? Is one perfect and the other perfective?]

yntax

Korean is typical of languages with a verb-final word order, such as Japanese and Turkish, in that most affixes are suffixes and clitics are enclitics, modifiers precede the words they modify, and most elements of a phrase or clause are optional.

See also Korean parts of speech.