World Language Map

Where is Korean spoken?

Korean (조선말) is a Koreanic language, spoken in South Korea, North Korea, China, the United States and 3 more. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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The filter only changes what is drawn. Tap the map to list every language at a spot, whichever family is shown. You can also pick any family from its own page.

Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

  • All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Korean is spoken

Korean is spoken in 7 countries: South Korea, North Korea, China, the United States and 3 more. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
South Korea100%52,081,800
North Korea88%23,142,856
China0.2%2,124,060
United States0.3%1,025,889
Japan0.5%640,650
Canada0.6%217,251
RussiaNot givenNot given

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, Korean is drawn as an area from Matsumae et al. 2021 (NE Asia). The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18643489), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Korean.

How many people speak Korean?

Wikidata gives about 77.3 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where Korean sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Korean as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Koreanic
  2. Korean

Related languages

Other languages in the Koreanic group:

More about Korean

Codes: ISO 639-3 kor, Glottolog kore1280. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Korean

Where is Korean spoken?

Korean is spoken in South Korea, North Korea, China, the United States and 3 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 100% of the population of South Korea, which is about 52,081,800 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Matsumae et al. 2021 (NE Asia).

How many people speak Korean?

Wikidata gives about 77.3 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.

Which language family is Korean in?

Glottolog places Korean in the Koreanic family.

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