Language comparison
Japanese vs Korean
They belong to different families: Japanese – Japonic, Korean – Koreanic.
Relatedness is not mutual intelligibility: languages of one branch can be unintelligible to each other, while very close ones (such as Serbian and Croatian) differ mainly in status and script. That is why we give no “similarity percentage”.
Japanese
日本語
- Family and branch (Glottolog)
- Japonic
- Japanesic
- Japan-Taiwan Japanese
- Japanese
- Script
- Japanese
- Hello / thank you
- こんにちは / ありがとう (konnichiwa / arigatō)
- Speakers (estimate)
- c. 118 million sum over countries per CLDR, including second-language users
- Official (1)
- Japan
- Without status
- a minority language in 3 countries
Korean
한국어
- Family and branch (Glottolog)
- Koreanic
- Korean
- Script
- Korean
- Hello / thank you
- 안녕하세요 / 감사합니다 (annyeonghaseyo / gamsahamnida)
- Speakers (estimate)
- c. 79 million sum over countries per CLDR, including second-language users
- Official (2)
- South Korea, North Korea
- Official in a region (1)
- China
- Without status
- a minority language in 4 countries
Where they are spoken
- Japanese 1
- Korean 3
Countries where the language has a legal status or is known by at least 10% of the population (CLDR); countries where it is only a minority language are not shown.