North Korea, South Korea, American Samoa, Australia, Bahrain, Belize, Brazil, Brunei, Canada, China, Germany, Guam, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mauritania, Mongolia, New Zealand and Northern Mariana Islands.

Although classified as a language isolate, many theories have been proposed to explain the origin of Korean. The most prominent of these link Korean to the Altaic languages of central Asia, a family that includes Turkish, Mongolian, and the Tungusic (for example, Manchu) languages of Siberia. Others would argue for the inclusion of Uralic languages (Hungarian and Finnish) and Japanese in this macro family. Although not definitively proven, this affiliation is accepted by most Korean linguists and deemed likely by Western linguists as well. The competing theory associates Korean with the Dravidian languages of southern India, or to Austronesian languages.

Determining Korean's linguistic affiliation is complicated by a long history of contact with the Japanese and Chinese languages. Not surprisingly, Korean shares certain linguistic features with each of these languages.

Officially, there are two standard varieties of Korean in Korea: the Seoul dialect in South Korea and the Phyong'yang dialect in North Korea. The dialects are distinguished and regulated by each country's policy on national language.

Regional dialects roughly correspond to province boundaries. Thus, South Korean regional dialects are Kyonsang, Chungchong, Cholla, and Cheju Island. The North Korean regional dialects are Hamkyong, Pyongan, Hwanghae. Some of the dialects are not mutually intelligible.

Korean uses a writing system called Hangul that has 24 basic symbols representing the sounds of the language. Words of Chinese origin have traditionally been written with Chinese characters, called Hanja, instead of being spelled out in Hangul. This practice is discouraged in North Korea, but is quite common in South Korean writing.

The symbols of Hangul are units reflecting Korean syllable structure. These syllables are sometimes referred to by Koreans as the actual "letters" of Hangul. Instructional material often presents Hangul in syllabary tables that graph the possible consonant and vowel combinations of the Korean language rather than citing the phonemic symbols individually.

Hangul is generally written horizontally from left to right, although it has been written in earlier times like Chinese, vertically, from right to left.

South Korea has an official Roman orthography (referred to as the McCune Reischauer system); it is mainly used on signs and maps (Grimes 1992). Other Romanization systems are also in use today.

• Being a highly phonetic language, pronunciation is generally uncomplicated; hence facilitating the learning process.
• Script is grouped in clusters eg. "seldom" can be witten in the following manner: S E D O or S D L M E O L M
• The Korean word for tears: "nunmul" is derived from two words: "nun" or eye; and "mul" or water.